Snake
by Emily Dickinson

American poet. Began writing poetry, according to her own declaration, in the winter of 1861-62. All but a handful of her poems were unpublished in her lifetime. She left over a thousand manuscripts which were gradually collected and published by her sister Lavinia. The three volumes brought out between 1891 and 1896 revealed poems of a deeply personal and spiritual nature and showed startling originality. After this, further collections of her work emerged, as The Single Hound (1914), and Bolts of Melody (1945). Her letters and selected commentaries on her life and work were edited by Thomas H.Johnson and published in 1958.

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Snake
by Emily Dickinson

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.

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Snake by Emily Dickinson