Question

Give summary of snake poem

Answer 1

This poem is set in the poet’s backyard, where
there is a water-trough. When the poet goes to
the trough to fill a pitcher with water for his
own use, he encounters a snake which has
come to the trough before him. The entire
poem revolves around this very encounter.
The poem consists of 19 stanzas of variable
lengths. The entire poem consists of 75 lines in
total.
1 stanza:
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In this stanza, the poet describes how it was a
typical summer day and how he had been
wearing pyjamas in order to cool himself. Again
in order to keep cool, he had gone to fetch
water from his trough, but found that a snake
had reached before him.
2 stanza:
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.
In this stanza, the poet describes how the
trough was kept in the shade of a large carob
tree and how that entire place had a strange
smell. When he poet reached with his pitcher,
he has to stand and wait for the snake to finish
drinking.
3 stanza:
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.
In this stanza, the poet describes how the
snake came out of a crack in the wall of his
house and how it slithered leisurely over the
edge of the trough and finally came to rest with
its throat on the bottom of the stone trough.
Water had fallen in drops from the tap forming
a small and transparent pool, from which the
snake drank silently and the poet could imagine
the water travelling through its long flexible
body.
4 stanza:
Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.
In this stanza, the poet says that generally he
was the only one to drink out of his trough, but
that particular day, he himself was second to
reach the trough and he had to wait as a result.
5 stanza:
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.
In this stanza, the poet describes how the
snake stopped drinking at one point and looked
at him, in the same way that cattle drinking in
ponds sometimes pause between sips. Then the
snake moved its forked tongue quickly from side
to side, thought for a bit and continued to drink
again. The poet imagines this snake to be
Typhon, the mythical and monstrous serpent
that was descended from Gaia and that was
finally defeated by Zeus by throwing Mount Etna
on it, but that still spews up fire and boulders
when the volcano erupts.
6 stanza:
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.
In this stanza, the poet says that while he was
in Sicily, he had learnt that black snakes will not
harm you, but that golden ones are poisonous.
So his education told him to kill the golden
snake that had come to his trough.
7 stanza:
And voices in me said, if you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and
finish him off.
In this stanza, the poet hears voices in his head
goading him on to kill the snake with a stick, for
that would prove his masculinity.
8 stanza:
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?
In this stanza, the poet says that he quite liked
the snake and was happy that it had come to
drink at his trough like a guest and then to
leave as peacefully as he had come to go back
to the depths of the earth from which he
imagines it had risen.

Answer 2

see the attachment for answer