In Paradise Lost, John Milton’s interpretation of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the serpent—which Milton, following Christian tradition, identifies with Satan—is infamously a seductive, possibly heroic, figure. This epic was incredibly influential on Dickinson’s literary milieu: Mount Holyoke graduates like Dickinson were “expected to leave with as thorough a knowledge of Paradise Lost as […] the King James Bible” (R. McClure Smith, The Seductions of Emily Dickinson. U of Alabama Press, 1997. Page 26); barring that, Dickinson would have absorbed Milton “through Emerson, Melville, the Brontës, the Brownings, Georgoe Eliot” (Eleanor Heginbotham, “‘Paradise Fictitious’: Dickinson’s Milton.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 7.1, 1998).

In “A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096),” the narrow serpent performs a microcosmic rendering of the Edenic Fall. The speaker’s first experience with the snake moves from the blissful ignorance of paradise to the mortal realm of fear and trembling: At first, his feet are “Barefoot” (Line 11), unclothed like Adam and Eve; later, he cannot see a snake without having a panic attack. The poem mirrors this journey from unawareness to knowledge for the reader with its riddle-like avoidance of the word “snake,” which the reader must infer from the signifier “narrow Fellow” that slithers away (Line 1).