flashed onto the morning road,

and the truck could not swerve--

death, that is how it happens.

Now he lies looped and useless

as an old bicycle tire.

I stop the car

and carry him into the bushes.

He is as cool and gleaming

as a braided whip, he is as beautiful and quiet

as a dead brother.

I leave him under the leaves

and drive on, thinking

about death: its suddenness,

its terrible weight,

its certain coming. Yet under

reason burns a brighter fire, which the bones

have always preferred.

It is the story of endless good fortune.

It says to oblivion: not me!

It is the light at the center of every cell.

It is what sent the snake coiling and flowing forward

happily all spring through the green leaves before

he came to the road.

Occasionally rides;

You may have met him,—did you not?

His notice instant is.

The Grass divides as with a Comb,

A 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 Morn,

Have passed, I thought, a Whip Lash

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 for them a transport

Of Cordiality;

But never met this Fellow,

Attended or alone,

Without a tighter Breathing,

And Zero at the Bone.

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

To drink there.

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.

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.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,

And I, like a second-comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,

And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,

And flicked his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,

And stooped and drank a little more,

Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth

On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me

He must be killed,

For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man

You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,

How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough

And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,

into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?

Was it perversity that I longed to talk to him?

Was it humility, to feel honoured?

I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:

If you were not afraid you would kill him.

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,

But even so, honoured still more

That he should seek my hospitality

From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough

And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,

And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,

Seeming to lick his lips,

And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,

And slowing turned his head,

And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,

Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round

And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,

And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered further,

A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,

Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,

Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,

I picked up a clumsy log

And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter,

I think it did not hit him,

But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste,

Writhed like lightning, and was gone

Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front

At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.

I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!

I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross,

And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,

Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,

Now due to be crowned again.

And so, missed my chance with one of the lords

Of life.

And I have something to expiate:

A pettiness.

Dickinson uses a metaphor when she talks about how a Whiplash is like how the snake is unbraiding in the sun.

The author also uses assonance such as "floor, too, cool, for..”

This poem creates an allusion with the black snake when it says " Zero at the bone".

In the second stanza, there is a simile that says, "The Grass divides as with a Comb.."

Dickinson also uses the use of rhymes throughout the whole poem.

It's written as a quatrain which is a stanza of four lines.

There is an allusion to "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" ”- “which the bones have always preferred”- the bones feeling absolute nothingness prefer to not acknowledge the certainty of death. 

There is the use of enjambment, the continuation of a phase without punctuation, throughout the whole poem.

In the third stanza, there is also visual imagery, "He is as cool and gleaming..".

The metaphor in the poem is ''useless as an old bicycle tire," and "lies in a loop." These metaphors of circles and loops compare how the cycle of life to the suddenness of death.

Written in free verse.

The poem includes a lot of anaphora. In the fifth stanza, it repeats "drinking, as cattle do" to emphasize the similarities to the snake. Also, in the 7th stanza the speaker has an internal conflict on how he wants to deal with the snake. He uses anaphora to demonstrate the dissension between his internal thoughts. He also shows that he was afraid to kill the snake because of his amazement towards the snake, on how out of all the places the snake chose him out of everyone.

There is alliteration, "being earth-brown, earth golden from the burning bowels of the earth..." This helps the flow of the poem.

There is use of a simile in stanza nine. It says, "And he flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black''.

Near the end of the poem the speaker's pace slows as they're observing the actions of the snake. Polysyndeton helps manifest the obsession he's starting to get over the snake, and how there's so much dismay around the aura of the snake.