A Narrow Fellow in the Grass

Source

Source: Project Gutenberg eBook #12242, Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete Source URL: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12242 Public domain basis: Complete text of the three posthumous series edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson (1890, 1891, 1896), with their editorial titles and regularized punctuation. Public domain. Coverage: Complete individual poem extracted from parent edition poems-of-emily-dickinson at bytes 93828-94495; checksum e74858b1af31e4eb58c421a03aa17da203ae8710b361cd582f65e9b4c4619c1a.

# A Narrow Fellow in the Grass

A Narrow Fellow in the Grass

XXIV.

THE SNAKE.

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.