of its death. By extension, Oliver seems to suggest,
it is the irrational belief in everlasting life, in spite
of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that
permits many people to continue to live and put
one foot in front of the other, day after day.
One can read in ‘‘The Black Snake,’’ there-
fore, two possible messages about death. First,
Oliver suggests that passion and the irrational
belief that death will not touch a person are a
gift. They allow a person to continue happily
throughout his or her life and get up every morn-
ing believing that the day will be good. It is also
possible, however, to read a bleaker message in
the poem. While a snake can go about its business
literally unaware that its life will one day end,
perhaps violently under the wheels of a truck,
humans do not have that luxury. As self-aware
creatures, the only way that humans can escape
thoughts of the inevitability of death is through
self-deception and denial, or by engaging in
fantasy.
Style
Memento Mori
Writing in an article inCross Currents,Douglas
Burton-Christie identifies one of Oliver’s poems
as a ‘‘memento mori.’’ A memento mori is a med-
itation on death, and it is a genre that extends
back at least as far as the Middle Ages. There are
many poems written within this genre; perhaps
the most famous of all is the Scottish poet William
Dunbar’s ‘‘Lament for the Makars.’’ In Scots, a
makaris a poet. In this poem, Dunbar laments the
deaths across time of all the great poets before
him, concluding each stanza with the refrain,
‘‘Timor mortis conturbat me,’’ a phrase from the
Catholic Office of the Dead that means ‘‘fear of
death disturbs me.’’ As Dunbar mourns the death
of his forbears, he also realizes that he, too, will
one day be dust, just as they are.
While it might seem a long stretch from a
fifteenth-century Scottish poet to Oliver’s ‘‘The
Black Snake,’’ Oliver is indeed operating in the
same generic convention. The death of the snake
in the road gives rise to her own contemplation
of the nature of death, its suddenness, its com-
plete annihilation of the life force. At the same
time, however, the contemplation of death turns
Oliver to a consideration of what it means to be
alive. As such, she is acting in accord with many
poets of the memento mori tradition. As Burton-
Christie suggests, ‘‘Oliver places herself in a long
and ancient company of seekers, for whom the
discipline of memento mori represented the sur-
est way of retaining a firm grasp on life.’’Enjambment and Caesura
Two important poetic devices that Oliver uses
skillfully in ‘‘The Black Snake’’ are enjambment
and caesura. Enjambment is a French term
meaning ‘‘striding over,’’ and this sense of move-
ment is an essential ingredient to understanding
its poetic use. Enjambment occurs when a poet
spreads a syntactic unit, such as a phrase or
sentence or thought, across more than one line,
sometimes from one stanza to the next. Some-
times scholars will refer to these as run-on lines.
In the case of ‘‘The Black Snake,’’ Oliver uses
enjambment between the first and second lines
of each stanza except the last; she also uses
enjambment at the ends of the third and fourth
stanzas. In using this device, she introduces a
slight pause in the middle of the syntactic unit,
brought about by the white space of the end of
the line or stanza. This affects the way that the
reader moves through the poem, at once speeding
up the process of reading and slowing it down
with a slight hesitation. When Oliver separates
the actions of placing the dead snake beside the
road and driving off, two actions she includes in
the same sentence but in different stanzas, she
emphasizes the difference between the dead and
the living.
Caesura is another important poetic device
featured here. A caesura is a strong pause in a line
of poetry, often marked by punctuation, occur-
ring within a line rather than at the end of a line.
Oliver uses this device very effectively in line 16 of
‘‘The Black Snake.’’ She places a period two
words before the end of the line, bringing to a
close her meditation on death. Immediately after
the period, she uses a word to signal a turning
away from her previous thought, a word that
functions like ‘‘however’’ in this poem. The cae-
sura underscores the turn.
Because Oliver typically writes short-lined
poems, it is crucial for students to note how and
why she chooses to line her poems as she does.
Enjambment and caesura allow her to invest
her verse with greater resonance and meaning.The Black Snake