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both. One day Dickinson’s friend Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield,
MassachusettsRepublican,put on his front page “The Snake”—which was not
her title, because she never gave any. We learn she “met Him,” this so-called
recluse “met this Fellow.” Her Amherst home had thirteen acres, with a meadow
opposite her window. As a girl she was told a snake might bite her, “but I went
along and met no one but Angels.”
Known by its first line, this poem snares our primal fear in a riddle.
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 Boy, and Barefoot—
I more than once at Noon
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—
Unnerving from A to Z, “A narrow Fellow” down to “Zero at the Bone,” that
is poetry when “it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me.”
It took someone whose “Verse is alive,” as she wrote Higginson, to come
alert yet vulnerable upon “A narrow Fellow in the Grass”—“narrow,” i.e.,
slim but also mean and confining, plus “Fellow,” a comrade but also an ill-bred
male. Then startlingly he “rides,” a cavalier not a reptile, and the next line
jars us with an unmarked question: “You may have met Him—did you not.”
This Fellow’s “notice sudden is,” strangely giving notice or noticing us, as the
inverted “sudden is” scrapes its rhyme against “rides.”