A Narrow Fellow In The Grass Comparison

Nature and Man have various interactions with one another, some good and some bad, but both rely on each other to thrive. “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” by Emily Dickinson, and “The Snake” by Wendell Berry both share similar experiences between man and snake, an animal of nature. These poems had differences in their way of telling the experience/story, but also had some similarities in other aspects. Though they have both similarities and differences, these poems are basically mirror images of the same idea, just with different ways to get to the point. “Narrow Fellow in the Grass” and “The Snake” share lots of similarities in many of the poems aspects. Both poets were talking about a dead snake, Berry’s poem, the snake can be proven dead

18-19). To find where Dickinson mentions a dead snake is much harder but one can infer with the stanza, “But never met this Fellow / Attended, or alone / Without a tighter breathing / And zero at the bone-”(l. 21-24), as the snake being dead because the speaker has a hard time catching/meeting the snake so the only time that he probably could meet it is when it’s either dead or caught by someone else; and since it mentions that the snake is cold it most likely means that the snake is dead. While the speaker in “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” mentions the snake being cold in the stanza quoted previously, the speaker in “The Snake” also touches upon its coldness and is entranced by it in the lines, “Now the cold of him stays / in my hand, and I think of him / lying below

In Dickinson’s “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” it never specifically mentions that the animal moving through the grass is a snake, but the reader can eventually infer it with its reference to “a Whip lash”(l. 13) because a whip is shaped very similarly to a snake, and snakes also move very fast under and through the grass much like the “Narrow Fellow” was described as doing. This is very different from the way that Berry approaches a very similar idea in a completely different way, right from the beginning of the poem it says “I found on the floor of the woods / a small snake…”(l. 2-3) which is much more direct and to the point. This allowed Berry’s speaker to talk more about what the snake was like up close and their experience with it, while Dickinson’s speaker described what the snake was like from afar and how he saw is flash by when he was a boy. Another small difference is that Dickinson’s speaker actually mentions his gender in the line, “Yet when a Boy,”(l. 11) this also gives the reader an idea of who the speaker is, since he is referencing himself as a boy he must be older and looking back at himself. Berry’s speaker has more of a childish touch, focused more on one enticing detail, “I held him a long time, thinking / of the perfection of the dark / marking on his back”(l. 11-13), but the speaker never gives away their gender nor if they wrote it when they