When a Snake is Just a Snake: Emily Dickinson and A.E. Stallings

Momentary by A. E. Stallings : Poetry Magazine

A narrow fellow in the grass by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation

"Momentary" by A.E. Stallings and "  "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" by Emily Dickinson. 

Snake Cousin??

I was unable to read A. E. Stallings’ poem, “Momentary,” without thinking of Emily Dickinson’s famous “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass.” I’m assuming Stallings was aware of the similarities and contrasts between the two poems. In fact, exploiting that difference may have been Stallings' motivation for “Momentary,” and I applaud her bold decision as well as the poem itself. At first, however, I wondered why she would mess with an icon—not only Emily Dickinson, but also that particular, widely known poem.

First, let’s address sex and gender. Anyone doubting that Dickinson’s reptile is somewhat, or completely, phallic should reread the poem with a penis in mind. This might add a (softly or firmly) comic dimension to the poem—and I do hear a primarily bemused, curious tone prior to Dickinson’s dramatic last line. Although Stallings is still more understated, Dickinson is not exactly a hysterical, Victorian old maid concerning her (unconsciously sexual) serpent.

 

Eden??

I’m choosing the version of "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" in Thomas Johnson’s Final Harvest--still the definitive edition of E.D.’s Selected Works, as far as I know. This is also the version at Poetry Foundation, except that they do not replicate Dickinson’s quatrains or her quirky punctuation and capitalization. In other versions of the poem, the “boy” is changed to “child,” and the time of day changes from “Noon” to early “Morn.” I don’t know who made the change or why they did it.

In the early version I’m using, Dickinson’s contrivance of a male speaker is a fascinating complication, but it probably boils down to the stereotype of young males as more likely to be barefoot and encountering snakes than girls would be in the 1860s. Even today, if I say, “A kid is fascinated by a snake,” don’t most of us hear that kid as a boy? And given Dickinson’s language, his adventure is an encounter with his own sexuality as much as the reptile itself.

Whether the boy is straight or gay is not as important as it might seem. Either way, an encounter with his sexuality is, or at least might be, a terrifying experience—a confrontation with magic and terror all at once. For that matter, girls might experience even more of that “Zero at the bone,” that freeze of terror, when they witness and unconsciously sense the snake of Eden and Freud.

If we go in that direction with Dickinson, we might wonder if A.E. Stallings, with her female speaker and lady snake, is suggesting lesbianism. Instead, I think Stallings is trying to remove the snake from the sexual and demonic components conferred upon it by the Judeo-Christian tradition. Her snake is more simply a beautiful, mysterious creature of nature, and Stallings is sharing that experience with us: the beautiful thing that flees when I appear. Sometimes a snake is just a snake. Without the comparison to Dickinson’s “A Narrow Fellow,” I don’t think I’d have considered anything sexual about Stallings’ snake, although her decision to make the animal female is counterintuitive, or at least untraditional, and thus invites speculation.

Killdeer or Quizzical Eve??

Each snake seizes its speaker’s attention and elicits compelling images. Dickinson’s narrow fellow is a “spotted shaft” and when he moves, he’s “a whip lash, / Unbraiding in the sun,” as he parts the grass like a "comb." Stallings’ snake skin is like valuable metal, “chain mail . . . / Aglint with pewter, bronze and rose.” It calls to mind a zither’s sound as well as a zithery, zigzagging motion when it “Quicksilver[s] into tall grasses” (Dickinson’s tamer “comb” of a snake might seem emasculated by comparison).

After disturbing it, Stallings can sight the snake’s movement “only by her flowing,” which strikes me as more graceful and mysterious than Dickinson’s grass-combing fellow—although the two poets’ perceptions are more alike than different. All of Stallings’ images have positive connotations: beauty, speed, grace and mystery—whereas E.D. is at least open to the argument that her snake is the “wrinkled,” terrifying, phallic, Satanic serpent of Eden.

Stallings’ female snake is entirely pretty and never menacing. When human and snake encounter each other, the snake flees. And in the final line, the speaker seems wistful that their meeting has amounted only to a “Momentary” experience.  She’s sad to see the snake go, its shiny “glamour” fading into a shadowy motion in the grasses, until the speaker regretfully concludes that all she can do is “recognize her going,” which she caused by disturbing it. 

By contrast, and before we ever get to Dickinson’s memorable conclusion, “Zero at the Bone,” her boy-speaker is spooked by a snake that “closes at your feet / And opens further on.” There is distance between human and reptile. 

Eve with Headless Mallards

This Victorian snake likes a “bog,” which conjures swamps—dirty, messy, dank, sludgy, even sinister. Bog might also suggest the primordial ooze from which we came, but that doesn't mean we like our origins. When the boy dares to stoop for the snake, trying to “secure it,” it “wrinkled and was gone.” Compare those actions to Stalling’s more positive, even magical quicksilvering and zithering motions. Both snakes disappear into the grasses, but the two speakers’ perceptions are rather different.

I hear wonderfully understated poetry in the final lines of both poems. In Dickinson’s haunting, supra-rational conclusion, the snake creates a deathly panic, and who but Dickinson would think to name that fear “Zero at the bone”? In any case, after a brief fascination with the snake, the boy seems glad to be safely rid of it, while Stallings’ speaker is left with admiration and a sense of loss as Lady Snake avoids her and escapes. 

Bog with Barn Swallow's escape, bottom right

To return to my original point about sexuality in both poems, I think Stallings might be gently trying for a correction of Dickinson’s repressed and therefore heightened sexualization of things, including a serpentine, Puritanical demon (though, I repeat, “Zero at the bone” is the only place where Dickinson expresses dramatic fear, or fear of any significance; in fact, her overall tone seems rather bemused). One could even argue that the two poems are models of nineteenth- versus twentieth/twenty-first century apprehensions of human experience.

Many humans (not me) see the beauty of snakes that simply do what they must as a species. Whether phallic or merely reptile, scaring humans is not their primary concern. Writing more than a century after Dickinson, Stallings can more thoughtfully and aesthetically appreciate Nature and its creatures. She can calm down, holster her Freudian gun, and paint us a snake at least as exotic as Dickinson’s. But it’s a snake that conveys grace and quiet avoidance of conflict. It deserves no demonizing or over-dramatizing. 

Momentary by A. E. Stallings : Poetry Magazine

A narrow fellow in the grass by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation

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Cummings, Dickinson, Purple Finches

I think I read it right: the eyes of small birds do not rotate in the skull the way ours do; that's why they're always tilting, jerking, twitching their entire heads to catch an image.

I think this posing guy, with no dark patch on his crown, has a rich enough raspberry color to be labeled purple finch and not "just another" house finch. I have to catch myself on the verge of thinking "just another" cardinal, "just another" gold finch. They bring pleasure every day, but are not as exotic as, say, a Northern Parula Warbler at Magee Marsh.

The purple finch also made me think of e.e. cummings. Again. If the children in the poem were yours, would you be OK watching them follow the balloon man out of sight?

[in Just-] by E. E. Cummings : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.


But in case that's too easy--or God forbid, too happy--here's Emily again, thinking of a lover. Did we know she thought of lovers? How could we not have suspected?

Wild nights - Wild nights! (269) by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

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Emily Dickinson, "After great pain . . . "

After great pain, a formal feeling comes – (372) by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

In case I wasn't clear yesterday about the relative simplicity and sweetness of Dickinson's "Hope Is the Thing with Feathers," compare it to one of her darker poems, "After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes." Maybe I'm just a downer-guy, or maybe depression, despair, and death are inherently weightier matters than hope. In any case, it seems to me that nothing in "Hope" matches the power and nuance of the imagery and state of mind at the center of "After Great Pain." I'm not sure I've experienced the poem's dark weight of mind, emotion, or spirit, but when Dickinson calmly states, "This is the hour lead," she makes me think I know what she's talking about. She makes me want to flee, except that she seems to know something I need to know, whether I want to or not.

We're probably left with more questions than answers in "Great Pain." Exactly what constitutes "great pain" and a "formal feeling"? What caused them? Or does a little voice then kick in and call us dishonest for pretending we need to ask?

Also, Dickinson tries to make herself clear, but the grey blankness of this state of mind (should we call it layered?) is too amorphous for clarity or logic, even though it has the color, heft, and authority of lead. The best Dickinson can do is offer images that might come close to capturing a condition as elusive as it is definite. It lacks definition; it is definitive. It's been said that paradox is the language of poetry.

In every stanza, if not every line, there's a word, phrase, or concept that stuns me. Who would have thought of this as a "formal" feeling? Less mysterious, but awfully interesting is the fact that it arrives "after" great pain. Wouldn't most of us have chosen pain itself as the subject rather than its aftermath?

Why is this state personified as "He," and how does He become a "bore"? Or is "bore" the past tense of "bear"? If that's the case, what was it that He bore? The formal feeling? How so? And is there a play on the word "boor"? This might be a spot where Dickinson's quirky punctuation and word choice are pushing things at least an inch too far. How can we not wonder if she's simply struggling for rhyme?

A what contentment? "Quartz," you say? And wait, you're associating this aftermath of great pain with some kind of "contentment"? And then those last two lines--what happens, in what order, and how does it amount to a "letting go"?

All of this illustrates one of the great purposes of poetry (and probably all art): to capture experiences rather than talk about them, to use imagery and metaphor to express the inexpressible. I doubt any writer has offered any Message that has the impact of Dickinson's attempt to render an experience here.

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BACH, POETRY: BANALITIES FROM THE PROVINCES

I don’t know enough about classical music to declare much about it, but the power of all music intrigues me. So from my cultural outpost in the Midwest, I wonder: if Bach were composing today, would he be considered a wildly experimental guy—and at the same time a subtle, complicated genius? He feels remarkably modern to me.

I’ve heard that his method lies partly in the fact of his being confined to the harpsichord, before the booming pianoforte and its sustaining pedals were developed. Therefore, more notes are required, and variety arises from unexpected movements among the notes, rather than the big changes in volume and passion we know in Beethoven and the Romantics.

Whatever the case, I feel as if I’m hearing things from Bach that are as unpredictable as I would expect from Prokofiev or some avant-garde, starving composer who was writing just yesterday in Greenwich Village. But I like Bach better. I don’t enjoy him as much as some others—for example, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, or the rollicking Johann Strauss. I suppose that means I prefer Romantic boom-boom; I need a bigger spoon to stir my soup.

My limitations concerning classical music (and the visual arts) remind me that a lot of people feel the same kind of unease about contemporary poetry. Usually lacking rhyme and regular meter, and with leaps of thought that might be more demanding than, say, nineteenth century poetry, contemporary verse causes many readers to feel adrift, baffled, bamboozled, alienated. (Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, and Emily Dickinson are often considered more modern than nineteenth-century because of the complexities of their perceptions and language, but getting into that now might lead to an eternal digression).

But I think what I’m hearing in Bach, without being alienated by it, is an understated complexity of the unexpected. To my unschooled ear and soul, it's rarely or never emotionally stirring, but it makes my brain shift around in my skull. I cannot listen to Bach, or any classical music, as a soporific or as background—it’s too interesting; it keeps me awake. But the written word, spoken aloud? Puts me right to sleep.

GOTHPUNKUNCLE AND THE NEW CRITICISM, Part 2

Sunshine Musings


From Yesterday:
GPK: Value is dynamic rather than static. Whose stock is worth more now? Does T.S. Eliot mean as much to readers as he did 40 years ago?

Bjo52: “Value”? I hope the marketplace is not the primary determinant of value. If so, all poetry is virtually worthless . . .

Today:

Now, about your example of the local coffee house composer-singer, the value of his work beside Dylan, the Beatles, and other icons, you say . . .

GPK: Even if it was the greatest song ever (a song by the local coffee house guy), isn't it a text subject to the demands of context? The rigors of genre and cultural expectation?

Bjo52: The rigors of genre, yes. But I question how much the text is subject to the demands of context, if you mean culture, history, and so forth. However, I love the hugeness of the question, so here are some thoughts.

Are you saying one cannot appreciate or understand, for example, Shakespeare’s Henry plays without knowing the historical background of the Lancaster and York unpleasantness, or Shakespeare’s own vulnerability because of his queen’s sensitivity about her ancestors? If so, I can't agree. Although understanding context probably enriches those events and characters for a modern reader, there’s plenty of meat in the plays independent of Elizabethan history or the actual history of Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V. In fact, that very universality is a major criterion in judging what’s good, isn’t it?

Coming at it from another important perspective, if a reader chooses not to examine the actual lines of the text, if he’s using the literature only as a way of understanding more about history, he’s a pretty limited reader. Should I trust a critic who's skimming in his study of character and poetry, a scholar who uses a play primarily as an illustration of some point about the Wars of the Roses or the aftermath in Elizabethan England--or 21st century America?

I don't mean that the two disciplines should never cross paths, and of course intellectual history and art history are legitimate, important fields of study--as long as they announce that their purpose is to look at the literature, philosophy, religion, art, history and so forth as disciplines in relation to each other. But too often I've heard teachers of English talk openly or even proudly of using literature to teach history, and through history, politics, and from there to the teacher's own biases. What happened to the text? I do not accept that the text is a mere prop for the study of other fields; it may be that too, but it must first be its own entity, worthy of and demanding of study for its own sake--its intellectual and aesthetic properties.

Students and other careful, well-intentioned readers must first approach the literature carefully, line by line, word by word, and comma by comma; from there it's a natural and legitimate step to challenging each other and teachers about meaning and technique. If that analysis does not occur, points about cultural, political, religious, or other contexts will amount to little more than sloganeering.

In turn, that is part of the reason there's so much animosity about political correctness, which should simply mean treating each other and our groups with respect. Instead, it seems to mean, "I had some communist professor who made me say and write things I didn't think or believe. That's why liberals suck." The logic is incomplete, to put it mildly, yet I can see where it comes from: the classroom as professorial throne, the professor as dictator, T.S. Eliot not just frowned upon, but banned.

Bring this into the current, so-called national conversation. It's become a shouting match, an amassing of cheap shots and lies. That has become the culture or context for our talk with each other. I'd rather read Roethke's "The Waking" one more time than listen to the hyenas.

A New Critical perspective, as I conceive of it, would say, "Wait. Where's the evidence? Where are the facts? Let's look at them carefully, thoroughly, dispassionately. To the extent that's humanly possible, let's leave self-interest, vulnerabilty, rage and bullying at the door and see if we can agree on what actually has happened and is happening in this text, which may be this poem alone or this nation and the world." Quite possibly, that kind of careful examination of text might even create a different context, a culture of analysis rather than rhetorical flap and hatred.

That's a lot to ask, and it will never completely happen because we are at least as emotional as we are rational. Shall we therefore not try it? Shall we accept our status quo: Loudest wins?

Shakespeare's Henry plays are very much about Hal’s development as a human, a man, and a leader, and the nature of—the heartlessness required of?—leaders. There's the simultaneous appeal and repugnance we’re likely to feel toward a wit and buffoon, a self-interested pragmatist like Falstaff, the ersatz survivor, who ironically does not survive (as Hal's pal, as citizen).

How in the world is all that confined to the context or culture of young Henry's or Shakespeare’s England? What could be more timely than the bellicose rhetoric of Hotspur, or Glendower's exotic claims of a direct connection to the gods, the question of whom we can believe, and when, why, how?

We don't need to study aged history to appreciate the meaning and relevance of this; we may if we wish--out of curiosity or idleness. But what we must do is listen carefully to the characters' words and look at his actions and see how they're alive today. We don't need to know the particulars of the cultures that produced these characters; every culture produces these characters, admires these characters, divides loyalties among these characters, fears these characters, obeys and is victim of these characters.

Shall we compare Hal to George W. Bush, two overgrown children born into the lap of everything? Hal made it work, while even most conservatives now say, less than a year after the facts, that W. never did. How many history books about the Wars of the Roses must I read to acknowledge the plausibility of that comparison? Or the rigors to which a successful politician must submit, even if he’s a king, supposedly ruling by divine right? My answer is zero history, zero understanding of other cultures to get the gist of these plays that might seem so rooted in and confined to their specific eras.

Maybe it’s true that Leonard Cohen could not have written what he has written at other times or within other cultural norms. Maybe his culture has helped to produce him--surely it isn't either/or, is it? On the other hand, many or most great artists were aliens, or rebels, in their own times and places. I don’t know if that describes Cohen, but neither do I think we must have those answers in order to understand and love the beauty or wisdom this or that song. If we have some knowledge of Cohen's personal or cultural history, it might be useful or it might be dangerous; our first job and pleasure is to hear the song, not researching the intellectual climate in which it was written.

Ditto the unknown player at the coffee house. He may be singing about personal issues in early 21st century America, but if he isn’t at the same time singing about universal human concerns, he won’t be much remembered or honored beyond his few decades on the planet. And if he makes a zillion dollars, it won’t matter in the way that Dickinson and Whitman matter--they should matter first for their poems, secondly at most for the ways they do or do not reflect their culture.

GPK, is that too pompous for the sly humor in your commentary? It won’t be the first time I’ve been accused of bombast. I very much appreciate the sly humor, provocation, and enlarging of issues that you bring to the table.