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For a second look at
images, or phanopoeia,

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let's jump ahead 970 poems
or so in her canon, though

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only about seven years, to
poem 986, one most of you

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will probably be familiar with.

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"A narrow fellow in the
grass occasionally rides.

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You may have met
him, did you not?

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His sudden notice is.

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The grass divides
as with a comb.

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The spotted shaft is seen.

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And then it closes at your
feet and opens further on.

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He likes a boggy acre, a
floor too cool for corn.

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Yet when a boy and barefoot.

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I more than once at
noon have passed,

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I thought, a whiplash
unbraiding in the sun.

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When stooping to secure it,
it wrinkled and was gone.

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Several of nature's people
I know and they know me.

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I feel them for a
transport of cordiality.

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But never met this
fellow attended

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or alone without a
tighter breathing

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and zero at the bone."

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Here, the images
are in elongated

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as in stanza two, almost
scientifically described

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in terms of the snake snaking
through the grass then moving

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to kinds of land boggy and cool.

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And if you haven't got a
feel for this land yet.

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You learned what it felt like
as a child possibly barefoot.

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You also learn not only
what the snake in the grass

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looks like but sense
its speed like whiplash

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and feel its leisure
unbraiding in the sun.

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And know what it feels like
when trying to pick it up,

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it wrinkled.

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You also move out
of direct imagery

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to mental imagery in
knowing nature's people

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and feeling their quick passing,
a transport of cordiality.

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Yet also know the
fear they may inspire.

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And fear itself is
an image one felt

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inside the body contrasting
with the outside feelings that

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come earlier.

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Now fear is a tighter breathing
and zero at the bone, where

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chill cold is a number.

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But as a number,
it's more than cold,

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it's motionless, emptiness.

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I want to continue coming back
to what I've called melopoeia,

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or music in this talk.

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But here let me point
out just two instances

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where Dickinson's control
of rhythm is superb.

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First in line 3, 'You may
have met him, did you not'

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she arrests us speaking
directly to the reader

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and making us take note
through that pause.

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Also remark in passing
that the hymn capitalized

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is highly suggestive.

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Both of religious meaning
and of masculine energy,

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oddly perhaps conjoined.

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Also the last stanza is a
rhythmic masterpiece beginning

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with a kind of ambling rhythm.

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But then pausing in the middle
of a line 2 as if cautious,

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almost stopping.

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Beginning to be
alarmed at something.

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Then line 3 narrows us
in the word tighter.

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But also in the "th" sound,
in "without" and breathing.

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As though our breathing
is being constricted

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in the utterance of the poem
as well as in its meaning.

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And then that
emptiness, that zero,

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that utter terror opens
up and swallows us.

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Is this just a poem about
a snake in the grass?

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Yes and no.

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