a nrrow fellow in the grass分析
别妄想泡我
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2020年08月02日 06:40
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Themes
Appearances and Reality
“A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” is built around the contrast between what appears to be and what is. Dickinson wrote several “riddle” type poems, where she uses an extended metaphor to compare her subject to something, without coming right out and telling the reader what she is describing. Each stanza offers “clues” in the form of imagery, vivid word pictures such as the “spotted shaft” that divides the grass “as a comb.”
Dickinson describes her object — in this case a snake — by hinting at what it resembles. The speaker falsely recognizes the object, taking it for something else. There is a split between what it appears to be and what it actually is. This theme of appearances versus reality comes through most strongly in the fourth stanza. The speaker is recalling time spent walking through the grass barefoot. The speaker — a young boy — spots the snake in the grass, but perceives it to be the lash of a whip: “I more than once at Noon / Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash / Unbraiding in the Sun.” But just as the speaker reaches down to grab the Whip, he discovers it to be a snake, which slithers away: “It wrinkled, and was gone.”
What makes Dickinson’s poetic technique interesting is that she avoids words we would normally associate with snakes, such as “slither,” “scaly,” “slide,” “coil,” or the traditional descriptions of snakes as evil, demonic, or Satan-like. She chooses instead unlikely images, calling the snake a “fellow” who “rides” instead of slithers, who “wrinkles” away. She makes the reader conscious of language and forces him or her to imagine something in a way that one would not intuitively imagine it. In this way, she calls into question what reality is, and how much appearance plays a part in what we imagine to be real.
Fear
“A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” starts out with an image that seems to evoke the opposite of fear. The “fellow” in the first line hardly seems fearful, especially since the word “fellow” evokes a feeling of familiarity and a sense of ease. By calling the snake a “fellow,” Dickinson almost gives it a personality. It seems far from the imposing, fearful creature the snake has traditionally been thought to embody.
As the poem proceeds, the imagery continues to paint a picture of the snake as a harmless creature, one of “nature’s people,” with whom the speaker is well-acquainted. The snake is again called a “fellow” in the final stanza, but this time, the context is different. The speaker is revealing his fear of the snake. Meeting this creature, this “narrow fellow,” either “attended or alone” causes “tighter breathing.” It causes the speaker to feel “zero at the bone,” or to be chilled to the bone. The final stanza describes an irrational fear. Literary critic Barbara Seib Ingold explains: “Irrational fears arise from wha
t we do not understand; it is the many things one does not understand about a snake that add to one’s fear of snakes.”
Perhaps the speaker is thinking of the venomous bite of the snake, or of the mysterious habits of the snake. Often a creature associated with fear, and at times, evil, the snake has a curious place in history. We might say that “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” is an exploration of fear, using the creature of the snake as a catalyst for that fear. This poem shows fear to be a complex emotion — an emotion that exists in balance with comfort, as is suggested by the characterization the fearful snake as a “fellow.”
Style
Dickinson constructed the great majority of her poems around the short stanza forms and poetic rhyme schemes of familiar nursery rhymes and Protestant hymns. “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass,” for instance, is written in six quatrains, or stanzas of four lines each, rhyming only in the second and fourth lines. Most, but not all, of the rhythms are iambic, meaning the poem has regularly recurring two-syllable segments, or feet, in which the first syllable is unstressed and the second syllable is stressed. The first two quatrains of the poem are laid out in the hymn meter called common meter, alternately eight and six syllables to the line. But Dickinson narrows the pattern thereafter to sevens and sixes, alternately seven and six syllables to the line.
Dickinson made many deviations from the conventional exact rhyme used by her poet contemporaries. “Alone/bone” in the final stanza is this poem’s single exact rhyme, with similar sounds in the stressed vowels and in subsequent vowels and consonants, but not in the consonants immediately preceding the stressed vowels. “Me/cordiality” in stanza five is a vowel rhyme, and the other end rhymes are half rhymes, also called imperfect rhymes, off rhymes or slant rhymes, as in “rides/is” where the rhyming vowels are followed by different consonants, or in “seen/on” and “sun/gone” where the stressed vowels are different, but followed by identical consonants.
Dickinson often used alliteration and other repeated vowel and consonant sounds within lines and across lines and stanzas as alternatives to formal rhyme. In this poem, for example, the repetition of the sound “s” suggests the slithering of a snake. Alliteration is used effectively in “Attended or alone” and “breathing/bone” in the final stanza. Note, too, the echoing consonant and vowel sounds in stanza three’s “A floor too cool for corn,” and the prevalence of the long “o” sound in the concluding stanza underscoring the word “zero.”
Poem Summary
Lines 1 – 4
In the opening quatrain, Dickinson cleverly disguises the subject of the poem, a snake. This creature sounds harmless enough as it is introduced in line one. The term “narrow Fellow” is a nice use of colloquial language, “narrow,” meaning small in width as compared to length,
and “fellow” being a familiar term for a man or a boy, with an undertone that suggests commonness. The choice of the word “rides” is also interesting because it sounds like “glides” and “writhes” but gives the impression that the snake is being carried, or that it is floating along. In addition, the word can also mean torment, harass, or tease, and this definition fits the snake’s reputation as a sly tempter. The speaker goes on to ask readers if they, too, have ever encountered snakes, noting that these “narrow fellows” always seem to take people by surprise.
Lines 5 – 8
This second quatrain vividly describes the way a snake moves through tall grass. In line one, the grass is compared to hair and the snake to a comb moving through it. In line two, only part of the snake is seen, “a spotted shaft.” The snake is long, slender, and marked with spots, and it is quickly glimpsed as it passes at the speaker’s feet. After the flash of snake, the grass closes up and then is “combed” apart again as the snake moves on. There is something invisible, or ghost-like, in the way the snake slithers along, for the creature is mostly unseen but evidently there.
Lines 9 – 12
The snake likes “boggy,” or wet and marshy, land. Corn grows best in hot, dry soil, so the snake’s favorite environment is not suitable for growing corn. The speaker goes on to reminisce about one of many childhood encounters with a snake during a morning walk. The speaker’s detail about being barefooted is particularly provocative, for the thought of a snake slithering across one’s naked extremities would make most people cringe.
Lines 13 – 16
In these lines, the speaker continues the description of the childhood encounter. While walking along, the speaker sees something that appears to be a “Whip lash,” or flexible part of a whip, “un-braiding,” or coming apart. The lash of a whip is often made of braided pieces of leather, so the speaker might have thought that the Whip lash was disintegrating because it had sat so long in the harsh sunlight. The speaker recalls being well deceived by the snake. The speaker bends over the supposed “Whip lash” in order to pick it up, when it is suddenly metamorphosed in to a living creature that “wrinkled,” or crumpled and folded, and then slithered away. Oddly enough, a colloquial definition of the noun form of “wrinkle” is “a clever trick.” In a sense, the speaker was tricked by the snake, for it was not what it appeared to be.
Lines 17 – 20
In this quatrain, the poem’s speaker claims to be familiar with some of “Nature’s People,” or animals, and they with the speaker. The speaker seems to feel a real closeness to these creatures, referring to this connection as a “transport,” or strong emotion, “of cordiality,” or of warm friendliness.
Lines 21 – 24
The snake appears to be the one exception to the opinion described in quatrain five. Ev