The Snake
Emily Dickinson · 1891
Public domain
From Poems by Emily Dickinson, published in 1891. The text is free of copyright in the United States. This copy is the poem, without the Project Gutenberg header.
A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him, -- did you not,
His notice sudden is.
The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.
He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,
Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun, --
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.
Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;
But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.