a narrow fellow im the grass explanation line by line
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Answer:
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Explanation:
In summary, the ‘narrow Fellow in the Grass’ is a snake, as the phrase ‘in the Grass’ suggests, summoning the idiom ‘a snake in the grass’. The snake is seen from a child’s-eye view. The snake appears and disappears suddenly, and is apt to be mistaken for other things (e.g. a whip), and eludes our understanding. The snake moving through the grass

divides and flattens it as though it’s hair that’s been combed, and is slithering away as soon as the speaker notices it. Whilst the speaker is familiar with many creatures in the natural world, and gets on with them just fine, he (we learn the speaker was a ‘Boy’ in the eleventh line) has never encountered a snake without being rendered short of breath and feeling a chill to his very bone, even when in the safe company of other people. This ‘tighter breathing’ suggests constriction – much like a snake (a boa constrictor, for instance) tightening around its prey and squeezing the life out of it.
Given that the poem is partly about something being mistaken for something else, it’s remarkable just how deftly Emily Dickinson makes us as readers mistake one word for another. So not ‘Upbraiding’ – nothing so indignant – but ‘Unbraiding’, in a curious neologism. Not ‘stopping to secure it’, but ‘stooping’ to do so – but in doing so, inviting us to stop and do a double-take, and secure the meaning of Dickinson’s line. Similarly, ‘Whip lash’ invites two readings: the ‘lash’ is both the name for the flexible part of the whip, and for the action which the whip performs – a ‘sudden’ action, just like the appearance of the snake itself (‘Its notice sudden is’).
It’s worth analysing such features because it is this intriguing use of linguistic double-takes which makes ‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’ such a memorable description of a snake. As so often in her poetry, Emily Dickinson manages to convey the essence of the creature (as she does elsewhere with the cat), its movements, its manner, its appearance, in ways which strike us as at once idiosyncratic and strangely accurat