For a second look at images, or phanopoeia,
let's jump ahead 970 poems or so in her canon, though
only about seven years, to poem 986, one most of you
will probably be familiar with.
"A narrow fellow in the grass occasionally rides.
You may have met him, did you not?
His sudden notice is.
The grass divides as with a comb.
The 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 boy and barefoot.
I more than once at noon have passed,
I thought, a whiplash 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 them for a transport of cordiality.
But never met this fellow attended
or alone without a tighter breathing
and zero at the bone."
Here, the images are in elongated
as in stanza two, almost scientifically described
in terms of the snake snaking through the grass then moving
to kinds of land boggy and cool.
And if you haven't got a feel for this land yet.
You learned what it felt like as a child possibly barefoot.
You also learn not only what the snake in the grass
looks like but sense its speed like whiplash
and feel its leisure unbraiding in the sun.
And know what it feels like when trying to pick it up,
it wrinkled.
You also move out of direct imagery
to mental imagery in knowing nature's people
and feeling their quick passing, a transport of cordiality.
Yet also know the fear they may inspire.
And fear itself is an image one felt
inside the body contrasting with the outside feelings that
come earlier.
Now fear is a tighter breathing and zero at the bone, where
chill cold is a number.
But as a number, it's more than cold,
it's motionless, emptiness.
I want to continue coming back to what I've called melopoeia,
or music in this talk.
But here let me point out just two instances
where Dickinson's control of rhythm is superb.
First in line 3, 'You may have met him, did you not'
she arrests us speaking directly to the reader
and making us take note through that pause.
Also remark in passing that the hymn capitalized
is highly suggestive.
Both of religious meaning and of masculine energy,
oddly perhaps conjoined.
Also the last stanza is a rhythmic masterpiece beginning
with a kind of ambling rhythm.
But then pausing in the middle of a line 2 as if cautious,
almost stopping.
Beginning to be alarmed at something.
Then line 3 narrows us in the word tighter.
But also in the "th" sound, in "without" and breathing.
As though our breathing is being constricted
in the utterance of the poem as well as in its meaning.
And then that emptiness, that zero,
that utter terror opens up and swallows us.
Is this just a poem about a snake in the grass?
Yes and no.