The poem “Snake”, in the Reptiles section of D.H. Lawrence’s book Birds, Beasts, and Flowers details a powerful few moments when Lawrence is confronted by a snake at Lawrence’s water trough, in Taormina, Sicily. Not sure whether to attack it (for it is poisonous) or whether to simply admire it for its beauty, Lawrence ultimately leaves the reader at the end of the poem with his sense of pettiness at an attempt to scare it off by throwing a pitcher at it as it retreats down a hole in the wall.
It is a famous poem roughly three pages in length that is unrhymed, written in free verse, and representative of modernist literature. It was first published in 1921 and most critics agree that the encounter between Lawrence and the snake actually happened.
The Action Unfolds
The Snake poem describes how Lawrence, on his way to drink at the trough, discovers a snake drinking there already. He considers what to do and in the meantime the snake finishes its drink and exits through the hole. Lawrence decides to throw a pitcher at the snake as it disappears. The pitcher (he thinks) just misses the snake, but it spasms in recoil as it further retreats.
The snake in the poem exhibits a number of characteristics: it is something that “looks vaguely, like cattle do,” it “muse(s) a moment,” it is “earth-golden” (making it poisonous as he tells us). The snake, we are told, is also like a “guest in quiet,” and departs “peaceful, pacified, and thankless.”
Lawrence describes the horror he feels at watching it disappear: “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.”
And so Lawrence throws the pitcher. The “pettiness” he feels afterward for having thrown it is the last word in the poem.
A Split Lawrence
There are dualities of several kinds exhibited by the poem. There is the confrontation of Lawrence and the snake, and there is the tension Lawrence feels about what to do about it in his own head, whether to try to kill it or simply to observe it.
The pettiness Lawrence writes about indicates that a stronger man would have been able to let the snake go, without throwing anything at it. But as Lawrence indicates, his education has taught him “he [the snake] must be killed.”
Crisis and Response
The duality of the last part in the poem - where he reflects on the pettiness of his actions - can be seen as a result of the contrast between a crisis response which is ‘appropriate’ (attacking the snake as education and social convention would prescribe), and a crisis response which is ‘manly,’ that is allowing the snake freedom to traverse the area and leave in peace.
His poem manages to combine subtle observations of a short, tension-filled drama with the insights of a moral thinker and writer. Perhaps what is most disturbing about the poem is not that Lawrence was indecisive about what to do, but that a poisonous snake presents an inimitable foe, and that Lawrence for all his bravado was lucky to have escaped with the conclusion that he acted too meanly.
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