Monday's Poetry: "Snake"

by Pa Rock
Poetry Appreciator

I have two fairly large brush piles on my property which I intentionally created as sanctuaries for various forms of wildlife which might be in need of a home.   I also have an enormous rock pile that I have been building for the five years that I have called The Roost my home.  I have always regarded that big collection of stones as nothing more than just something else to mow around, but yesterday I made a surprise discovery that the rock pile, like the brush piles, is also a haven for wildlife.

As I was carrying stones from around the yard to the pile yesterday, I happened to notice a beautiful Orange-Striped Ribbonsnake - a type of gartersnake - lying on one of the flat rocks atop the pile warming himself in the sun.  I was too close to the two-foot long snake, and he became uncomfortable and slithered into a crevice in the rock pile and disappeared.

But it was a nice day and he was soon back out atop the pile absorbing the heat from the rocks.  We encountered each other several more times during the afternoon, and the snake gradually got so comfortable in my presence that when I came close he would just raise his head and stare - and then go on sunning himself.

The novelist and poet, D.H. Lawrence, had a similar encounter with a snake early last century at a well in Italy.  Lawrence, standing by with an empty pitcher, at first let the snake drink its fill, and experienced a bonding with the regal creature.    But then, as the snake began to slide away, the writer succumbed to primordial instinct and threw a stick at it - and almost immediately regretted the "pettiness" of his uncalled for attack on the reptile.  Lawrence's snake made good his escape, but the spiritual bond between the poet and the serpent had been irreparably broken.

Here is how D.H. Lawrence describes that emotional encounter:


Snake
D.H. Lawrence

    A snake came to my water-trough

     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 flickered 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 so 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 slowly 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 farther,

     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 an 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, I missed my chance with one of the lords

     Of life.

     And I have something to expiate:

     A pettiness.