The Full Text of “A narrow Fellow in the Grass”
1A narrow Fellow in the Grass
2Occasionally rides -
3You may have met him? Did you not
4His notice sudden is -
5The Grass divides as with a Comb,
6A spotted shaft is seen,
7And then it closes at your Feet
8And opens further on -
9He likes a Boggy Acre -
10A Floor too cool for Corn -
11But when a Boy and Barefoot
12I more than once at Noon
13Have passed I thought a Whip Lash
14Unbraiding in the Sun
15When stooping to secure it
16It wrinkled And was gone -
17Several of Nature’s People
18I know, and they know me
19I feel for them a transport
20Of Cordiality
21But never met this Fellow
22Attended or alone
23Without a tighter Breathing
24And Zero at the Bone.
The Full Text of “A narrow Fellow in the Grass”
1A narrow Fellow in the Grass
2Occasionally rides -
3You may have met him? Did you not
4His notice sudden is -
5The Grass divides as with a Comb,
6A spotted shaft is seen,
7And then it closes at your Feet
8And opens further on -
9He likes a Boggy Acre -
10A Floor too cool for Corn -
11But when a Boy and Barefoot
12I more than once at Noon
13Have passed I thought a Whip Lash
14Unbraiding in the Sun
15When stooping to secure it
16It wrinkled And was gone -
17Several of Nature’s People
18I know, and they know me
19I feel for them a transport
20Of Cordiality
21But never met this Fellow
22Attended or alone
23Without a tighter Breathing
24And Zero at the Bone.
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“A narrow Fellow in the Grass” Introduction
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Emily Dickinson's 1865 poem "A narrow Fellow in the Grass" uses the image of an encounter with a snake to explore the nature of fear and anxiety—especially the fear of deceit. Like the proverbial "snake in the grass," this snake is a creature of secretive, treacherous menace. This is one of Dickinson's most famous poems, and one of the few published during her lifetime—though that publication was anonymous, and she didn't approve the publisher's edits (especially not the addition of a title, "The Snake," which really gives the game away). It's a great example of her characteristic style, including her use of common meter, slant rhyme, and powerful dashes.
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“A narrow Fellow in the Grass” Summary
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The speaker introduces a skinny gentleman who travels through the grass, and suggests that the reader might have encountered this fellow themselves. He tends to take people by surprise.
His body parts the grass like a comb running through hair, giving away a quick glimpse of a long, spotted shape before the grass closes around him and then is parted again somewhere else.
This fellow likes to live in out-of-the-way places like marshy land and cool barn floors. But when the speaker was a childhood, he also sometimes encountered this fellow out in the broad daylight.
The speaker thought he was walking by an abandoned bit of whip rope lying in the sun. But when the speaker bent down to pick it, it wriggled away and disappeared.
The speaker reflects that he is familiar with many animals and that those same animals are familiar with him in turn. The speaker even feels a sense of friendship with and affection for them.
But he's never had an encounter with this creature, either by himself or with company, without feeling breathless and constrained by fear.
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“A narrow Fellow in the Grass” Themes
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Fear, Deceit, and the Unknown
The poem is essentially an exploration of fear—specifically, the fear of the unknown and the related fear of being tricked or deceived. This notion of deception is present in the form of the poem itself, as it describes the experience of encountering a snake without ever actually saying the word “snake.” The snake is unpredictable, appearing and disappearing without warning and sometimes looking like something else altogether. The speaker uses this tricky snake to explore the nature of fear and anxiety—the sense that, in what seems to be a perfectly normal moment, a hidden danger might lurk.
The speaker introduces the snake with strangely polite and euphemistic language. In describing the snake without calling it a snake, he holds it at a fearful arm’s length. For example, the speaker calls the snake a “spotted shaft”—a physical description that is at once vague (what on earth is a “spotted shaft?” Well, it’s long, and it has spots…) and strange, evoking the feeling of catching only a glimpse of the snake as it passes.
The speaker also personifies the snake, calling it a “fellow”—an everyday term that nonetheless seems to give the snake a weirdly human quality. If it’s a “fellow,” it has thoughts and intentions of its own. This seemingly bland or even friendly word thus creates a sense of menace.
This snake seems to be an archetypal snake, a snake that sums up all snakiness: it’s only ever referred to in the singular, as a specific “fellow,” but presumably the speaker is not encountering exactly the same snake over and over through the course of his whole life. This generality helps to support the idea that the speaker is dealing with a bigger idea than just “snakes are scary”: the snake carries the symbolic weight of the experience of fear, and especially the fear of deceit. This makes sense, given that snakes are ancient symbols of trickery; the snake in the Garden of Eden is perhaps the most familiar example of the snake as a deceiver.
The speaker goes on to remember his childhood encounters with the snake, when he was “more than once” fooled into almost touching it. The snake’s power to disguise itself is a big part of what’s frightening about it. For example, the speaker remembers his childhood self believing that the snake was a “Whip Lash,” the rope part of a whip, and bending to pick it up—at which the snake would “wrinkle” and disappear.
That the snake never bites the speaker, but merely disguises itself and then vanishes, supports the idea that this is a poem about fear. Fear is all about uneasy anticipation. Thus, it matters here that the snake-surprise happens more than once: the speaker can never be sure if this is going to happen again the next time he tries to pick up a bit of old rope. The speaker’s description of himself as “barefoot” and his finding the snake “at noon” further reinforce his sense of vulnerability: barefoot, he’s extremely bite-able, and even the bright light of the noonday sun can’t keep him safe from making snake-related mistakes. The deceitful snake can strike even in times that seem safe.
The speaker ends by musing on his experience of snakes as part of the natural world: while the speaker feels at home with other creatures, even loves them, he just can’t get used to the snake, and always meets it with fear. And even though the speaker is never actually attacked by the snake, he describes the sensation of encountering it as a breathless tightening and a “zero at the bone”—a fearful feeling of constraint that might call to mind the way a snake constricts its prey.
The terror of the snake is thus always to do with uncertainty. Menacing and disguised, the snake stands not just for danger but for concealed, deceiving danger: a fear that can constrict you even before it physically strikes. In the end, the speaker’s fear of the snake is the fear of all bad fortune, but especially of the dangers of deceit—which, like the snake, is unpredictable and uncomfortably common.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Nature and Humanity
In this poem, nature has a double nature. It can be both friendly and menacing, familiar and strange, welcoming and violent. And in his reaction to the snake, the speaker shows that he is not separate from the natural world. Humans are just as much a part of this world as animals are, the poem implies, and thus are subject to the same hard facts of life and death.
In the first stanza, the personification of the snake sets the animal on the same footing (if you will) as the speaker. The snake is a “Fellow,” and one that “you may have met”: human terms for a distinctly non-human creature. By treating the snake as a member of civilization, the speaker opens up a connection between the animal and the human world.
The speaker’s descriptions of his encounters with the snake then show his own bodily vulnerability to the snake’s power—that is, to the natural world. The speaker describes meeting the snake while he’s “a boy, and barefoot”: that is, he’s vulnerable both in his youth and his lack of shoes. Being “barefoot,” here, is being without some of the defenses that humans put up between themselves and the natural world. This again implies a close connection between people and nature, but also that such a connection comes with its own dangers.
The last stanzas specifically mark the snake out as the unknown threat that lurks within an otherwise peaceful kingdom. The speaker describes feeling a “transport / Of Cordiality” for “Several of Nature’s People,” meaning he shares a friendship or kinship with other kinds of animals. This strongly-flavored language (especially juxtaposed with the image of the treacherous snake) might even suggest the natural harmony of the garden of Eden; at the very least, it’s a powerful image of the human speaker's close connection with nature.
The snake is the exception to this rule, however: forever separate from these friendly relationships in its menace, it has immediate bodily power over the speaker, separating him from the natural world where his other animal relationships connect him. But both the peaceful and the violent creatures are “Nature’s People”—and, the poem implies, so is the speaker. Humans are not separate from the animal world—and that also means they are not immune to its perils.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “A narrow Fellow in the Grass”
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Lines 1-2
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides -The seemingly simple first lines of the poem, like the snake they describe, are deceptively slippery. The speaker introduces "A narrow Fellow," and already the reader gets a sense that some strangeness is afoot.
"Fellow" is an everyday, comfortable sort of word—one that you'd use to describe a guy you met in the street. But what does it mean to call a fellow "narrow"? It's an odd word to choose; if you were describing a thin person, you might call them—well—thin! Or you might call them slim, or slender, or skinny; not "narrow," though. The word has uncomfortable connotations of constriction and tightness; it gives the reader a claustrophobic sense of strangeness.
This strangeness compounds when readers learn that this narrow fellow is "in the Grass." This turn of phrase, in conjunction with the "narrow Fellow," might raise the reader's hackles: it seems readers must be dealing with a snake here.
This might be an allusion to the phrase "a snake in the grass," meaning a traitor, which goes back as far as the ancient Roman poet Virgil. The speaker's mention of the grass here thus isn't neutral: not only are readers meeting a snake, they're meeting a concealed, sinister, and likely deceitful snake.
There's a further hint of this danger in the subtle internal sibilance of "Grass," "occasionally," and "rides"—sibilance that will continue through the rest of the stanza. That quiet hiss and buzz—hidden within the words, not boldly out in front—contributes to the feeling of hidden snakiness.
Even more subtly, the form of these lines gives the reader a sense of unease through their grammar:
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides -These lines quietly disorient the reader by running subject-object-verb, rather than the more usual subject-verb-object. This is a delicate effect; it's not so unusual to find writers playing with grammar this way in poetry. But it does help to contribute to the overall effect that, with this narrow fellow, readers are on shifty ground.
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Lines 3-4
You may have met him? Did you not
His notice sudden is - -
Lines 5-8
The Grass divides as with a Comb,
A spotted shaft is seen,
And then it closes at your Feet
And opens further on - -
Lines 9-12
He likes a Boggy Acre -
A Floor too cool for Corn -
But when a Boy and Barefoot
I more than once at Noon -
Lines 13-16
Have passed I thought a Whip Lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled And was gone - -
Lines 17-20
Several of Nature’s People
I know, and they know me
I feel for them a transport
Of Cordiality -
Lines 21-22
But never met this Fellow
Attended or alone -
Lines 23-24
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone.
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“A narrow Fellow in the Grass” Symbols
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Snakes
The snake is a powerful and ancient symbol. Over time, it's carried many meanings, from wisdom to death to life to trickery. But it's in its most familiar role as a dangerous deceiver, as it appears here.
The reader probably knows the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, in which a serpent persuades Eve to eat the fruit from the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In this ancient story, the trickster snake is the original enemy of humanity. That snake's presence can be felt in this poem, where the dangerous "narrow fellow" disguises himself as something as innocuous as a bit of old rope.
In both its stealth and its dangers, then, the snake represents deceit itself—as well as the fear of being deceived.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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Whips
When the snake appears to the speaker to be a bit of old rope, he's not just any bit of old rope. He's disguised as a "Whip Lash"—the rope part of a whip (as opposed to the handle).
Whips have symbolic connotations of speed, pain, punishment, and violence. As a living "Whip Lash," the snake has the potential to inflict all of these on the unwary wanderer.
Whips are also used to drive animals, making the poem's connection between the speaker and the animal world even clearer. He, as much a part of nature as any of "Nature's People," is in no way immune from the blow of this whip.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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“A narrow Fellow in the Grass” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration in poetry often creates a feeling of continuity, smoothness, similarity, or evenness. In this poem, alliterative smoothness covers over the much more jagged and frightening emotions just beneath the surface. At the same time, alliterative emphasis helps to evoke those scarier emotions.
The poem begins with subtle alliteration in the first stanza, where /n/ and /m/ sounds gently interweave with each other. But the alliteration becomes more pronounced as soon as the snake appears and "A spotted shaft is seen" in line 6. At this first appearance of the "fellow," readers get not just alliteration but a dose of sibilance appropriate to the hissing sinuous snake. (For more on how sibilance in particular works in this poem, check out the dedicated "Poetic Devices" entry.)
The alliteration gets more emphatic with hard /k/ and /b/ sounds in the third stanza as the speaker works up to his repeated childhood encounters with the snake. Here, there's less a sense of smoothness or continuity than of thumping: "But when a Boy and Barefoot" gives the reader the feeling of a heart pounding harder at the approach of a terrifying thing. That thing, encountered in the fourth stanza, is accompanied by another sibilant run of /s/ sounds ("Sun," "stooping," "secure")—though, appropriately, none of these /s/ sounds actually describes the disguised snake, but the things around it and the actions of the speaker. The "hiss" is hidden.
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
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Apostrophe
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Assonance
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Enjambment
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Caesura
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Personification
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Sibilance
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Simile
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"A narrow Fellow in the Grass" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Fellow
- Boggy
- Acre
- Whip Lash
- Secure
- Transport
- Cordiality
- Zero
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An informal, friendly word for a man.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “A narrow Fellow in the Grass”
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Form
"A narrow Fellow in the Grass" consists of 24 lines. It doesn't use any particular form. But it does use a number of Dickinson's characteristic moves, like a predominantly iambic rhythm and quatrains.
The poem's six stanzas (each of which has four lines) have a deceptive regularity. On a first reading, the verses might seem similar. But if the reader looks more closely, they'll find that the rhythm of the poem stealthily changes as it goes along, moving from common meter to iambic trimeter. (See the "Meter" section for more on this.) As readers see more and more of this snake, the poem's pulse gets quicker.
As with all of Dickinson's poems, it's important to note that some of her wishes for capitalization and punctuation aren't totally clear: her choices vary across copies, and the few poems that were published in her lifetime were often altered substantially by newspaper editors. (When this poem was first published, it was given a title, "The Snake," which rather undermines the poem's sense of unseen menace.)
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Meter
This poem starts out in one of Dickinson's favorite meters: common meter, known as such because, well, it's pretty common. It may be familiar to you from any number of poems, but it's sometimes suggested that Dickinson might have taken to it because of its frequent use in hymns.
Common meter uses an iambic rhythm (da DUM) in lines that alternate between eight and six beats, like this:
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides -Line 1 here has four iambs, making it a line of iambic tetrameter. Line 2 has three iambs, making it a line of iambic trimeter. This poem uses textbook common meter for the first two stanzas. But in the third stanza, it breaks into a punchier iambic trimeter:
He likes a Boggy Acre -
A Floor too cool for Corn -The rest of the poem stays in iambic trimeter: a harder, more insistent rhythm, and one that allows less room to breathe. As you can see above, many of these lines also end with an extra unstressed syllable—something called a "feminine ending" (as in "Acre"). This perhaps creates the sensation of the speaker running out of breath, unable to complete the full line of iambic tetrameter. You may observe that this fits right in with what's happening in the images at the end of the poem. Encounters with the snake produce "a tighter breathing," and the meter follows along.
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Rhyme Scheme
The rhyme scheme that the reader can chart in this poem is as follows:
ABCB
This should come with a caveat, however: while there's certainly a traditional pattern here, it's almost all slant rhyme, not pure rhyme. So when one says this poem rhymes in an ABCB pattern, one also needs to note that the B rhyme might be between "rides" and "is," "seen" and "on," "Sun" and "gone." The only pure rhymes in the poem come in the last two stanzas, with "me"/"Cordiality" and "alone"/"Bone."
The initial mismatch between rhymes fits in perfectly with the poem's themes. The snake itself might be said to "rhyme" with the "Whip Lash" it resembles—but it definitely isn't a perfect rhyme. The slippery matches between the words here echo the poem's theme of deceit and disguise. Something, in these rhymes, just doesn't quite add up.
The poem's final return to pure rhyme, then, brings readers back to some kind of certainty: when the speaker feels ease and friendliness in the natural world, rhyme returns. There's also something complete and final in the speaker's fear. The terror of the snake's deceit, at least, is not slippery: it's a fact. If the snake is marked by its deceptions and its treachery, the speaker's response to it is also marked by a simple bodily terror.
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“A narrow Fellow in the Grass” Speaker
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The speaker here tells readers little about himself: only that he was once "a boy." Readers can infer, then, that the speaker is now a grown man.
Though the poem doesn't say much about the speaker directly, the way he tells his snake stories suggest that he's a sensitive, thoughtful fellow. He's a nature-lover, and apparently spent a lot of time outdoors as a child. He feels intense, even rapturous affection for much of the natural world. Even his personification of the terrifying snake suggests that he has a powerful imagination.
And perhaps it's partly the power of that imagination that makes the snake so terrifying. The speaker reads in the normal behavior of snakes an intent and a malice that suggests a bigger archetypal evil. To this speaker, a snake is not just a legless reptile.
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“A narrow Fellow in the Grass” Setting
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In a very few words, the speaker creates a vivid setting: a rural farm.
There are a few hints here that readers are dealing specifically with the countryside, where humans and animals come into uneasy contact. The "Boggy Acre" puts a human measurement on a wild area of land; the "Floor too cool for Corn" suggests a shaded barn. When the snake is in disguise, it masquerades as a common human tool: a "Whip Lash" that one might use to drive horses or cattle.
This isn't just the wilderness, then: this is a sort of border territory, where the boundary between what's nature and what's civilization is not totally clear.
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Literary and Historical Context of “A narrow Fellow in the Grass”
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Literary Context
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was an utterly original writer, and stands out from her literary world as much as she fits into it. Some see her as prefiguring Modernism, a 20th-century literary movement noted for its interest in psychology and its experimental forms. But she was also clearly a part of contemporary 19th-century American Romanticism, a visionary cousin to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman.
The American Romantic interest in the human connection to nature (and the spiritual experiences to be found there) is clear in "A narrow Fellow in the Grass." One can also see the marks of the earlier English Romantics here, especially Wordsworth, whose poetry had a big influence on Dickinson both stylistically and thematically; he and Samuel Taylor Coleridge prefigured Dickinson in their reclamation of folk forms of poetry like ballads.
This is one of the few poems of Dickinson's that was published in her lifetime. She wrote it around 1865, and it was printed anonymously (and with a number of grammatical changes) in the Springfield Republican, a local newspaper. Notably, the editor published the poem under an unauthorized title, calling it "The Snake." Takes away a little from the sense of nameless menace, doesn't it?
Historical Context
Emily Dickinson was famously distant from the outside world. When she was 35, she became a recluse, and for the rest of her short life she only rarely left her house.
But she lived in a chaotic time, and was far from indifferent to what was happening outside the walls of her family home. The horrific, bloody, and interminable American Civil War raged all through Dickinson's most productive writing years. (Dickinson was from Amherst, Massachusetts, and as a Northerner her political loyalties were very much with the Union forces.)
"A narrow Fellow in the Grass" was written in the year that the Civil War finally ended. The reader can speculate that a poem about the terrors of deceit and double-crossing might well have been influenced by a conflict that infamously pitted "brother against brother." Even harmonious nature, this poem seems to suggest, has in it the potential for such conflicts and such betrayals.
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More “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Out Loud — Julie Harris delivers a nicely sinister reading of the poem.
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The Emily Dickinson Museum — The website for the museum in Dickinson's former home, with much more information on her life and works.
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The Poem in Dickinson's Own Handwriting — View a copy of the poem from the Morgan Library.
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The Poetry Foundation on Dickinson — A short biography of Dickinson, including links to some of her poems.
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The Meaning of Snakes and Serpents — A breakdown of the historical and symbolic significance of snakes in myth and literature.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Dickinson
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