Snake

The Snake by D H Lawrence – Summary & Analysis

The Snake – Introduction

The Snake is a narrative poem written by the English poet and novelist D H Lawrence.

Written in first person narrative technique, it recounts the poet’s memory of a hot day in Sicily when he encountered a snake.

In the poem, the poet is at his water-trough to fetch a pitcher of water when he sees the snake drinking from the trough.

What follows is the poet’s internal struggle and realisation of his sentiments and faults as we drop into the scene with the magnificent and deadly golden snake.

The text”of the poem is divided into nineteen stanzas of irregular length.

It is written in free verse and thus has no rhyme scheme, but it makes up for it with the prodigal use of assonance, consonance and alliteration.

D H Lawrence Is known to challenge social conventions and to question arbitrary norms and this poem is a perfect example of it.

The poet questions social teachings and explores the intricacies of human thought and action.

The snake is a well anthologized poem and displays the poet’s concerns of man’s distancing from nature.

The poem is also filled with subtle allusions to religious themes. Some critics argue that ‘The snake’ by Lawrence has a few similarities to the tale of Adam and Eve, in that both deal with what is called ‘moral corruption.’

Stanza wise Explanation of the poem ‘The Snake’

Stanza One:

“A snake came to my water-trough

On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,

To drink there.

The poem begins with the subject matter of the poem, that is the snake.

The poet was living in Sicily at the time when the poem was written and is recounting the memory of a hot day when he was wearing his pajamas.

He says that a snake came to his water trough that very day to drink water.

Stanza Two

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree

I came down the steps with my pitcher

And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.”

The poet had gone to his water-trough to fill a pitcher with water.

The trough was shaded by a dark carob tree and the place had a strange smell. As he came down the steps he realized that he must wait and stand aside as there was a snake already at the trough.

Stanza Three:

“He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom

And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of

The stone trough

And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,

And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,

He sipped with his straight mouth,

Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,

Silently.”

In the third stanza the poet describes the movement of the snake. He says that the snake came down from a fissure (crack) in the mud wall of his house.

The poet further says that the snake trailed along to the edge of the stone trough. Here he makes rich use of words to describe the snake’s movement The words ‘yellow-brown slackness’ and ‘soft-bellied’ invoke a vivid picture of the snake in our mind.

The snake slowly slithered towards the bottom of the stone trough and started drinking with what the poet calls his ‘straight mouth’ the water that had dripped down from the tap. In the last line of the stanza, he again says ‘the snake drank water through his slack gums into his slack long body silently.’

We can see a good use of alliteration (and sibilance) in this line with the repetition of the sound ‘s’ which is perhaps intentional on the poet’s part to perhaps mimic the snake’s hissing.

Stanza Four:

“Someone was before me at my water-trough,

And I, like a second comer, waiting.”

The fourth stanza is a fairly short one and only repeats what the poet has said before.

The poet here emphasizes that someone was at ‘His’ water trough and that he was standing there as a second.

This suggests that the snake’s presence is, naturally, not at all welcome by the poet.