accompanied by her own text calledOur Worldin
- Her 2008 volume of poems,Red Bird,was
critically well received and continues her ongoing
interrogation of the nature of all things.
Poem Text
Lines 1–4
‘‘The Black Snake’’ is a poem of twenty-four lines
divided into six quatrains, or stanzas of four lines
each. In the first quatrain, Oliver immediately
places the reader in a situation already under
way: a snake suddenly darts out onto a highway
just as a truck approaches. Oliver uses a word in
line 2 to describe the quickness of the snake’s
approach to the road; this implies that the driver
of the truck could not have avoided the collision.
The truck runs over the snake and kills it. A word
that she uses in the third line suggests an allusion
to a very famous poem by William Stafford
called ‘‘Traveling Through the Dark,’’ about a
driver who is unable to swerve his car out of the
way to avoid hitting a deer. Oliver contemplates
that this is a way creatures die. She italicizes the
word ‘‘death’’ in the fourth line to emphasize it.
Lines 5–8
In the second stanza, Oliver reports that the
snake is dead on the road, his body in a circle,
and without use. She compares the body of the
dead snake to the black rubber covering of a bike
wheelbywayofasimile,acomparisonoftwo
objects using the word ‘‘like’’ or ‘‘as.’’ Because the
rubber is ancient, it cannot be used for its pur-
pose, that of making a bike able to be ridden; that
is, since the snake is dead, it no longer has any
purpose. She gets out of her automobile and
moves the snake into some shrubbery along the
side of the road.
Lines 9–12
In the third stanza, Oliver uses several additional
similes to convey the quality of the snake’s body.
She says first that his body is cold and shining, and
she compares the snake to a whip. She also states
that the snake is lovely and makes no noise, just as
a sibling who had died. This comparison is star-
tling; one would not necessarily think to compare
a snake with a human sibling. Yet the comparison
is apt, since Oliver wants to make the point that
humans and animals are all related. There is a
period after the third line, indicating a stop at the
point where she has made the comparison.
Finally, Oliver reports that she places the snake
under the ground cover. She does not, however,
use a period at the end of this line, such that the
sentence carries over to the next stanza in a tech-
nique called enjambment. Enjambment breaks a
syntactic unit, such as a sentence or phrase, across
lines or stanzas. Thus, Oliverbeginsasentenceat
the very end of the third stanza that she does not
complete until the fourth line of the fourth stanza.Lines 13–16
The fourth stanza begins with a coordinate con-
junction, a word such as ‘‘and’’ or ‘‘but’’ used to
join parts of a sentence together. In this case,
Oliver joins two actions: dropping the snake
and motoring away. Although she has left the
snake behind, she is contemplating mortality.
Again she italicizes the word ‘‘death,’’ lending
weight to the consideration. She lists three char-
acteristics of the end of life: it comes quickly and
without warning; it is an awful, heavy thing; and
it is unavoidable. These three items are spread
over three lines of the fourth stanza. She uses a
period in the middle of the final line of the stanza,
indicating that she has finished her thought. In
addition, after the period she uses a word that
suggests a turn in the poem away from the med-
itation on death, and she once again uses enjamb-
ment to carry the reader to the next stanza.Lines 17–20
Oliver continues the turn away from her thinking
about death in continuing her sentence into the
first line of the next stanza. She writes that
although everyone rationally knows that all living
things die, all living things also carry in them a
warm place, a happier thought. Oliver says that
this is the belief that only good things will happen.
Further, it is the belief that one will not really die.
The final line of the stanza can be taken in several
ways. One is that the speaker being represented is
in denial; that is, she believes that everyone else
must die, but not her. Another way to interpret this
line is that something in the speaker believes that
she will continue to survive in some manner.Lines 21–24
Oliver generalizes this thought at the beginning of
the final stanza by suggesting that it is this bright
sparkthatisatthecenterofeventhesmallest
organism. She says that this belief in life itself is
what makes living possible even in the face of
certain death. She concludes by saying that it was
this belief that kept the snake slithering along in
the vernal leaves before he met his end on the
highway.The Black Snake