Emily Dickinson's "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" Analyzed
This essay analyzes Emily Dickinson's poem "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" (1866), focusing on the central image of the snake and Dickinson's deliberate use of the word "fellow" to establish an uneasy kinship between the human speaker and the animal world. The paper examines how Dickinson avoids the Western literary cliché of the evil serpent and instead treats the snake as an anthropomorphized peer — disliked but acknowledged. Drawing on scholarly readings by George Montiero and Paul Bray, the essay traces the poem's kinesthetic imagery, abrupt line breaks, and childhood recollections to argue that Dickinson uses the snake as a vehicle for reflecting on what humans find alienating in both animals and other people.
- Introduction: The Serpent in Western Literature and Dickinson's Reframing: Dickinson reframes the evil serpent as uncomfortable fellow
- The Word 'Fellow': Anthropomorphism and Uneasy Kinship: How 'fellow' establishes human-animal kinship
- Kinesthetic Imagery and the Shock of Encounter: Syntax and form mimic the sensation of seeing a snake
- Publication History and the Significance of the Title: Original title stripped the poem of its fellowship theme
- Childhood Memory and the Snake as Recurring Fellow: Recurring snake encounters across the poet's life
- Conclusion: Fellowship Without Warmth: Snake acknowledged as fellow but never warmly embraced
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper builds its entire argument around a single word — "fellow" — and sustains that lens consistently from introduction to conclusion, giving the analysis coherence and focus.
- It integrates scholarly voices (Montiero, Bray) to support close-reading observations rather than substituting for them, showing how secondary sources can reinforce textual analysis.
- The paper connects literary form to meaning effectively, noting how inverted syntax and abrupt stanza breaks mimic the physical sensation of encountering a snake.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates sustained close reading: it begins with a culturally loaded symbol (the serpent), then methodically unpacks how Dickinson destabilizes that symbol through word choice, imagery, and structure. Rather than cataloguing devices, the essay asks why each device matters, tying formal choices back to the poem's central argument about human–animal fellowship.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens by situating the poem within the Western serpent tradition, then introduces its thesis about uncomfortable fellowship. Subsequent sections move through the poem roughly in sequence — the opening lines, the kinesthetic shock of encounter, the publication context, and the childhood flashback — before closing with the poem's final image of "zero at the bone." This progression from cultural context to textual detail to conclusion mirrors the movement of a careful literary analysis.
Introduction: The Serpent in Western Literature and Dickinson's Reframing
One of the most central images of Western culture and literature is that of the evil serpent who threatens and tempts humanity. In such a reading, the serpent is an alien beast — even the devil incarnate. This figure has become a cliché, although the animal retains its power to frighten. The serpent tempted Adam and Eve, and even in its literal form it has the ability to terrify a viewer on sight and to poison an unsuspecting ankle. Emily Dickinson's poem "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" engages with this tradition only to redirect it: even though the speaker is afraid of snakes, she nonetheless acknowledges a fellowship — a commonality — between all human beings and animals.
The snake may be an unpleasant fellow, just as many human fellows might be narrow, unpleasant, and cold. The poet thus sets herself the daunting task of making the description of this animal seem fresh, and frightening in a new, more human way. Like Blake's poem about the tiger burning bright, Dickinson transforms a chance glimpse at a garden snake into something sinister — not because of the snake's inherent evil, but because of the fellowship between humans and snakes. Dickinson does not take the easy route of making the poem's subject more fearsome than it is in reality. The snake does not speak or seek to threaten the speaker's soul or even her life. She is simply afraid of its attitude and finds it distasteful.
The poet therefore acknowledges her fellowship as a living being with this alien creature while still admitting that it is not a creature she particularly likes, because of its silent and surprising nature — much as she would dislike a person of similar temperament. Rather than a poem about the inherent evils of the snake or serpent, the poem becomes a critique of what human beings find dislikable in the character of other humans as well as animals. It takes on a reflective tone, as the poet acknowledges a living kinship with this chance visitor, yet not very willingly, given his narrow and cold qualities. Much like an unpleasant person, she would just as soon not encounter him.
The Word 'Fellow': Anthropomorphism and Uneasy Kinship
The first line of the poem gives it its name. It is worth noting that Dickinson seldom titled any of her poems; her later editors gave them their names, most often simply the first line, for the sake of identification. The line "A narrow fellow in the grass / Occasionally rides;" sets a foreboding tone while simultaneously making the snake anthropomorphic through the word "fellow" — a designation that implies an unpleasant surprise rather than outright menace. By calling the snake a "fellow," Dickinson signals that she is trying not to be prejudiced against this living being.
"You may have met him, — did you not, / His notice sudden is." She notes the alien presence even a common snake can carry, given the suddenness and silence of the "meeting" — a shock that is not the snake's intention. The sense of the snake's strangeness exists in the mind of the viewer, not in the snake itself. Because of his nature and appearance, the snake cannot help but take the reader by surprise.
Dickinson also stresses "fellowship" between the narrow fellow and herself — not just between the reader and herself as a shared observer — in order to admit her own and the reader's prejudice against a fellow being. Paul Bray has called Dickinson's sense of oneness with nature and the animal kingdom "mystical" in its communion, but it is equally possible to see her fellowship as part of a unique religion of oneness among all members of the living animal kingdom, or simply an acknowledgment of the closeness of human beings in spirit to the natural world (Bray, 1992). The snake is like a fellow the poet does not like, even if he is part of one's wider community — disagreeable, as some human fellows are, but a fellow nonetheless. The poet, reader, and poem's subject are all fellow living dwellers upon the earth, just as humanity comprises a variety of different temperaments.
Kinesthetic Imagery and the Shock of Encounter
To convey the shock of seeing a snake, and to give a verbal sense of the sensation, the inverted closing phrase "notice sudden is" at the end of the first stanza is designed to take both reader and poet by surprise — a jolt that mimics the startling nature of seeing a green or brown snake in green or brown grass. The poem's stanza breaks further reinforce this effect, conveying the poet's thought process rather than the nature of the snake itself. The snake's terror lies in the surprise it produces in the reader's mind, not necessarily in the snake's own nature or intention.
The description of the snake's movement has a strong kinesthetic quality, designed to show why this animal causes human beings to feel fear and alienation. As George Montiero observes: "The adjective 'narrow' is hardly unusual, but welded to 'fellow' (which in this context is equally common), it takes on a visual-kinesthetic meaning. Visually, this noun-cum-attribute recreates, in a sense, the very movement of the snake as it 'rides' along the ground," before revealing itself at the poet's feet (Montiero, 1992). The poet brings the reader into the moment of seeing the snake, creating a sense of unity between reader and poet in their mutual shock.
To stress the common connection of all animals — including human animals — Dickinson, after anthropomorphizing the snake as a "fellow," makes further use of common human objects to describe the non-human fellow. "The grass divides as with a comb," as the snake's narrow body is seen to part the blades before it, and "A spotted shaft is seen;" but before the viewer can react, "it closes at your feet / And opens further on," passing the viewer by but still leaving fear in the viewer's heart, because of the creature's coolness and its sense of remove.
Conclusion: Fellowship Without Warmth
Like other natural creatures in the poet's embrace, the snake is honored with humanization as a fellow. The poet acknowledges her prejudice against those individuals who possess a snake-like nature, who hide from her, comb the ground, or seem like a whip and then disappear. But that does not make the snake any less of a fellow being — any more than a disagreeable human fellow one does not warm to personally is any less a member of the human community.
This is why she writes: "But never met this fellow, / Attended or alone, / Without a tighter breathing, / And zero at the bone." The snake, although it never physically harms or tempts the poet, does not inspire a feeling of connection, even though it is a "fellow" creature. The poem thus closes not with resolution but with honest discomfort — the poet cannot will herself into cordiality with the snake, yet she cannot deny their shared place in the living world. That unresolved tension, between acknowledged fellowship and visceral alienation, is Dickinson's most searching insight: that kinship with the natural world does not always feel like warmth, and that honesty about one's own prejudices — toward animals and toward people — may be the closest thing to genuine fellowship available.
Works Cited
Bray, Paul. "Emily Dickinson as Visionary." Raritan, vol. 12, no. 1, 1992, pp. 113–125.
Dickinson, Emily. "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass." 1866. The Norton Introduction to Literature, 8th ed., pp. 758–759.
"Emily Dickinson." Biography and Analysis. The Online Literature Library, last updated 2005.
Montiero, George. "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass." The Explicator, vol. 51, no. 1, Feb. 1992, pp. 20–23.
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