A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)

In Paradise Lost, John Milton’s interpretation of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the serpent—which Milton, following Christian tradition, identifies with Satan—is infamously a seductive, possibly heroic, figure. This epic was incredibly influential on Dickinson’s literary milieu: Mount Holyoke graduates like Dickinson were “expected to leave with as thorough a knowledge of Paradise Lost as […] the King James Bible” (R. McClure Smith, The Seductions of Emily Dickinson. U of Alabama Press, 1997. Page 26); barring that, Dickinson would have absorbed Milton “through Emerson, Melville, the Brontës, the Brownings, Georgoe Eliot” (Eleanor Heginbotham, “‘Paradise Fictitious’: Dickinson’s Milton.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 7.1, 1998).

In “A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096),” the narrow serpent performs a microcosmic rendering of the Edenic Fall. The speaker’s first experience with the snake moves from the blissful ignorance of paradise to the mortal realm of fear and trembling: At first, his feet are “Barefoot” (Line 11), unclothed like Adam and Eve; later, he cannot see a snake without having a panic attack. The poem mirrors this journey from unawareness to knowledge for the reader with its riddle-like avoidance of the word “snake,” which the reader must infer from the signifier “narrow Fellow” that slithers away (Line 1).