"Snake" is D. H. Lawrence's best known poem. It is not only the most anthologized (and hence the most taught) but also the most analyzed. A glance at the poem itself provides some immediate, if only surface, explanations:

The poem has a narrative line. A man, on a hot noon in Italy, comes to fill his water pitcher from a trough and finds a snake there. For an interval, in spite of the "voice" of his education which tells him the snake is dangerous and should be killed, he is fascinated and feels honored by the snake's presence. However, as the snake turns to leave the speaker is overcome with horror and throws a log at it. He immediately regrets the act, curses the voice of his education, and, after comparing the snake to Coleridge's famous albatross, wishes for its return, realizing that he has a "pettiness" to expiate.

Since the "voice" of the poet's "education" is declared "accursed" at the end of the poem, and is detested, it allows us to deprecate authority and celebrate the "natural" response which authority is traditionally seen as stifling. Yet since we have all obeyed, at one time or another, our education to our regret, the poem lets us off the hook by its statement that what we have to expiate is only a "pettiness."

And finally, since many modern readers will regard snakes as phallic, it gives the reader the thrill of approving the sexual, the "uninhibited," with no risk attached. Teachers of literature and makers of anthologies can justify including the poem in their respective courses and books as a way to introduce Lawrence, the "prophet of sexuality," precisely because the sexuality of the poem is symbolic rather than overt. Lawrence, the writer of Lady Chatterley's Lover can here be shown as a poet of high skill and intensely serious moral purpose.

Academic criticism of the poem most often sees "Snake," in the context of the volume Birds, Beasts and Flowers where Lawrence first collected it, as a striking example of the poet's acknowledgement of the unknowable "otherness" of the animal and vegetable world. The speaker evokes his humility in the face of the multiplicity of the creation. But, surprisingly, there has been no psychoanalytic analysis of the poem. One of Lawrence's best critics, Keith Sagar, has come the closest. I quote Sagar at léngth (with the caution to note his practically knee-jerk use of the word "reduce").

.. . the snake comes to serve as an analogue for the poet's own manhood, his real "I" as opposed to "voices in me," or, to reduce it to Freudian terms, the ego which seeks to mediate between the id (the spontaneous, instinctive self) and the universe. As the snake issues clear from the burning bowels of the earth, so the man must meet him with a response (gladness and humility) which issues cleanly from his own bowels without the intervention of the super-ego (the voices of his education). . . . The "fissure" above the water-through (which itself suggests fertility), the dark door of the secret earth . . . combines with the phallic snake in a sexual metaphor. When the voices of education have done their work it becomes, we notice, a "horrid black hole." The poet's violent, almost hysterical response to the snake's putting his head into the hole is a symptom of that horror of the sex act which Lawrence saw to be at the root of our nullity and neurosis.¹

Sagar has done the greatest amount of contextual work on Lawrence, and of all his critics has come, I think, closest to the mark. But in his desire to make the poem "doctrinal," to make it an extension and a clarification of Lawrence's developing conscious philosophy, I suggest that he misreads the poem. In putting it in the context of Lawrence's declared position, he has still not provided enough context in the light of the complexity of the text itself.

"Snake" was first published in the Dial in July of 1921. We can say from both internal and external evidence that it was almost certainly written in the same month a year earlier, in July of 1920. In December of 1919 Lawrence began his first literary attack on Freud, the book of amateur psychoanalytic theory published in early May of 1921 as Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. The critical reception of Lawrence's venture was varied, but it was not warm. Undaunted, Lawrence began another attack in May of 1921, clearly in response to the reviews, which was published in 1922. He begins the book with a personal defense and titles it aggressively The Fantasia of the Unconscious.

Three differing but satisfactory discussions of Lawrence's theories are extant so I will give no extended account of them here.² What can summarily be said is that Lawrence found the unconscious, which he associated directly with the id, "pristine." Freud, he reports, found in the unconscious only a "huge slimy serpent of sex, and heaps of excrement. . . . "³ However, when Lawrence began his second book in reply to Freud, he found that he and Freud were being shelled in the same boat. Lawrence, attacking Freud in 1919, found in 1921 that he had to scramble to defend the unconscious, the area, if not the concept in which he and Freud agreed. The enemy, to some extent, was now an ally. "Snake," however, emerges from the period six months after Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious was completed, and eleven months before its earliest reviews. Lawrence had not as yet acknowledged Freud as even a begrudged ally.

It is in this context, then, that I propose an interpretation of "Snake" which is finally more in accord with the text itself. I propose that "Snake" begins as a deliberate, even careful repudiation of Freudian theory, particularly as it concerns the Oedipus complex, and then breaks down under the pressures of a severe confrontation with castration anxieties. Far from being a moral triumph, the concluding third of the poem presents us with confusion, recognition, and compensatory (excuse making) activity, the purpose of which is to relieve the anxiety and guilt felt at the compulsive behavior exhibited in the second part of the poem. While I will quote extensively from the text, it will be helpful to the reader to have a copy of the poem. What I refer to as part I comprises lines 1-40, part 2, lines 41-57, and part 3, lines 58-74.

The poem begins after the discovery of the snake, and shifts immediately back to the present of the experience. The vacillation between present and past tense continues throughout sections one and two. Section three is past tense throughout.

The first two stanzas read:

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 I must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.⁴

Line 63 of the poem identifies the time of the action of the poem more closely as "intense still noon.... " It is day, but Lawrence is in his pajamas, and further, in the "deep strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree. . . . " The snake reaches down, in line 7 "in the gloom." Line 63 provides another odd insistence on the day/dark contrast. The snake has disappeared "Into the black hole, the earth lipped fissure in the wall front,/At which, in the intense still noon I stared with fascination." The effect is that the blackness of the hole is accentuated by the brilliance of the sunlight; yet the poem has earlier told us that the arena of the snake's action is in "gloom." This contradiction, however, only appears in the third section of the poem. The fissure which becomes "black" and horrible in the third section, shows only in the first section "a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom."

The repetition in line two, "On a hot, hot day, and I in my pyjamas for the heat [italics mine]," is unnecessary. The poet needs to convince us, or himself (or both) that the pajamas and the journey to the water trough were appropriate. He finds, at the end of his journey "down the stairs," that "there he was at the trough before me." The line can be read as meaning "in front" of me. But the poem will not allow only this reading. Lines 14 and 15, a stanza to themselves, insist:

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

The tense shifting I referred to earlier can account for part of the control evidenced in the section, but we are apparently presented with a symbolic rendition of the primal scene. The poet, in his pajamas, with the excuse of heat, and his pitcher in his hand to demonstrate his sincerity, moves down-stairs in the dark to the source of solace and nurture, here a "trough," and finds that "he" occupies the speaker's place in a dark area that smells "strange."

What is missing, however, is the sense of violence, noise, motion, and fear which we expect to be associated with such traumatic occurrence. Is this in fact the primal scene? Yet, how otherwise are we to account for the insistent details?

After the third stanza cited earlier, and the fifth, which elaborate the speaker's fascinated watching of the drinking snake, the poem resumes with:

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.

Here, then, is the violence we looked for earlier, but its source, we are told, is not in the "self," but in the voice, which becomes, almost immediately, "voices" accusing the poet of being less than a man. The speaker, however, is not alarmed. He is, he reports, pleased.

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.

The "must I," rather than the anticipated "I must" provides the answer. It is part of the first of four questions, on the surface asked by the speaker of himself, but on closer examination, clearly asked by the speaker of the reader. The point is somewhat difficult to make because of a difference between British and American English. A native American might write, and, less probably, might say "I must." He is much more likely to say "I have to." Were he to say "must I," he would be accused of affectation. In British English, the construction carries very nearly the American sense of "is this really necessary," and I propose that it is precisely in this sense that Lawrence uses the otherwise unnecessary inversion. It is not really necessary. The calm in the poem demonstrates that it is not really necessary. This, and the following three questions are rhetorical. The speaker asserts by implication that he is not humble, is not a coward, and is no pervert. The next two stanzas provide ample substantiation.

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.

The language slips into Biblical "I was afraid, I was most afraid. . . . " But the intent here is not to establish the sacredness of the moment; rather it is to show that this is no crass fear; this is the fear which is to be identified with respect and awe in the sense that Job is reported to "fear God and eschew all evil." The situation which is supposed to be terrifying is, rather, awe producing. While the speaker feels no humility, he is honored. He stands in awe before his god, but his knees do not knock. Much of what is meant can be seen by comparing, say, the phrase "the awful presence of the Lord" with a statement like "it was awful" in contemporary vernacular.

All of the components, then, of the primal scene are here, but they are changed, the predicted responses, the "normal" responses are denied; they are, in fact, transmuted. The super-ego "voice of my education" is denied, is conquered. In the most basic terms, the ego is represented as having triumphed over the super-ego in the service of the id. There is no real struggle. There is even a kind of coyness in the "But I must confess how I liked him. . . . " Lawrence is saying, from one perspective: I have looked in the face of the god, despite prohibitions, and I have lived and was honored. If then we consider the strength of Lawrence's animus against Freud—it must have rankled him considerably to have been told repeatedly that a book which was as difficult and costly for him to write as Sons and Lovers was "Freudian"—then I suggest that we don't have to look very far to find the identity of the first "voice" that Lawrence refers to as the voice of education, nor is it difficult to understand how that voice becomes "voices" a few lines later. Lawrence's quarrel with Freud was based, as I stated, on his notion that the unconscious was pristine while as he saw it, Freud found there "the slimy serpent of sex, and heaps of excrement." Lawrence has here looked on the face of the serpent and found him likeable, even well mannered, a "guest." Further, he has looked on the serpent in the most threatening of circumstances, when its position denies him his rightful place beside the access to his source of comfort and nurture. Lawrence felt, that Freud was thus answered.

But the poem continues.

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, very slowly, as if thrice a dream,
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.

If we identify the trough as the mother, what are we to do with the hole in the wall face? I suggest that what Lawrence has done, and that his ability to do so makes possible the control in the first part of the poem, is to split the function of the mother into two aspects, the nurturing and the sexual. The water-trough represents her as comforter and nurturer, in which aspect Lawrence, one of several children, is capable of sharing her. The mother's other aspect is that of creator and destroyer. Hers is the "dark door of the secret earth" from which the snake issued. Hers are also the "Burning bowels of this earth . . ." into which he will return. If we look back now at the fifth stanza of the poem we see the power attributed to this figure. Lawrence tells us that the snake is "earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth/On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking." Why should the bowels of the earth be burning unless Lawrence conceives them as the source of the volcano? Further, this is a volcano with which Lawrence has very particular associations.

In Sea and Sardinia, a travel book composed between February and March of 1921 (seven months later than "Snake"), Lawrence writes about the mountain:

Ach, horror! How many men, how many races, has Etna put to flight? It was she who broke the quick of the Greek soul. And after the Greeks, she gave the Romans, the Normans, the Arabs, the Spaniards, the French, the Italians, even the English, she gave them all their inspired hour and broke their souls. Perhaps it is she one must flee from. At any rate, one must go: and at once.⁵

Etna is again, both life giver ("Gave them all their inspired hour") and life denier ("broke their souls"). We cannot help but note here the similar usage of "break" in the 26th line of "Snake," "If you were a man/You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off." The snake, as the poet thinks back after its departure, "seemed to me again like a king/Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,/Now due to be crowned again." The operative part of the statement is "uncrowned in the underworld," which implies that the snake has power only when he has left the underworld, the "burning bowels of this earth [emphasis added]." It is "this" earth in the second part of the poem, while it was "the" earth in line 20 and "the secret earth" in line 39. The vision has been particularized. The aspect of mother as nurturer has been separated from her aspect as castrator, as "uncrowner."

The snake, for his part, is represented in strangely contradictory language as both willing victim and as bewitched. When he turns to reenter the wall face, Lawrence tells us that he "lifted his head dreamily, as one who has drunken" and moved "slowly, very slowly, as if thrice a dream. . . . " Yet, his entry into the wall face is described very differently. He "put his head into that dreadful hole,/.. . he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther, . . . / Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after. . . . "A possible explanation is that Lawrence wishes to convey that the deliberateness of the snake's actions are to be accounted for by his being "a dream," that he moves not "quickly," but as one controlled, in the sense of deliberate meaning slow, unhurried, and steady, rather than in the sense characterized by or resulting from careful and thorough consideration (as in "Let us move with all deliberate speed"). But if this explanation is correct, we encounter further difficulty in the following two stanzas.

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 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.

Why, if disturbed by the thrown "log," and hence presumably awakened from his spell, would the snake continue to enter the wall face? Why does it lose its dignity at the moment it is awakened? It is at this point in the poem, I suggest, that Lawrence's reply to Freud begins to break down. Having separated the mother figure into two aspects, the poet finds that he cannot cope with the implications of the second. The snake, bewitched or deliberately, is committing himself to the female in a way that Lawrence can only view with "A sort of horror, a sort of protest. . . . " The articulate and controlled poet who had no difficulty with the voice of his education has uncontrollable difficulty dealing with the snake entering "that dreadful hole," "that horrid black hole. . . . " The convulsion of the snake, the "undignified haste," are equally apt if they are applied to the behavior of the speaker himself. If the snake has been "other" earlier in the poem, here the poet is painfully identifying with it. He throws the "log" to prevent the snake from leaving, to keep it from entering the fissure in the wall. Nothing that the voices of his education could have told him will account for this action. The voices of his education tell him to kill the snake, or at least to drive it off. Yet it is clear, if we look at the passages carefully that what the poet protests is not the snake, but the snake entering the fissure. For all the confusion in the section, the language is clear on this point. "And as he put his head into that dreadful hole, / And as he slowly drew up . . . and entered farther, / A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole//... / Overcame me . . . [my italics]."

Whatever the voice of his education has taught the poet, it has not taught him to be horrified at the departure of a snake, nor has it taught him to "protest" such a departure. The speaker's actions cannot be called "educated" in any sense; they are instead manifestations of a violent psychological reaction to a symbolically perceived castration. Just how violent this reaction has been is attested to by the poet's attempt to deny it. He concludes the poem with these four stanzas.

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.

Surely, this is an odd collection of words to describe such an act. How is the act "paltry," "mean," "vulgar," or petty? The words have one consistency, they can all be used to describe the acts of a peasant, and it seems possible that Lawrence intended them to reinforce the concept of the snake as a king. The act is thus not so much a crime as it is a failure to recognize royalty and give it its due. In this case, the "I despised myself is a becoming attitude. The poet is saying; I will not lay the entire blame for my act on the "voices of my accursed human education," I will accept personal blame for having given in to them. They ought not to have been strong enough to have so influenced my action, so while they are in part culpable, I will not deny my own doltishness in not remaining responsive to the real order of the natural world. If this is in fact Lawrence's intention, then it is clear that aesthetically the strategy fails. A peasant, after all, is precisely uneducated. It is the paltry, mean, vulgar, peasant who would be closest to the rhythms of "natural" life. It is the peasant who would be most susceptible to the kind of priapic worship that Lawrence would seem to be advocating. It is the peasant who recognizes the king.

But whatever the motivation for the particular choice of words, the effect is that Lawrence is saying "How could I have been so insensitive as to commit this inconsequential, common, small, ordinary, act?" One does not raise one's hand against a king, but if one does, one hardly justifies it by calling it a pettiness. Whatever his strategy for doing so, Lawrence's choice of words shows a serious divigation of purpose from his apparent initial intention. The poem which has set itself up as a lesson in natural religion a la Wordsworth and Coleridge has become complicated beyond any boundaries that their systems will allow. Indeed, I find no "system" per se that the poem, taken in its entirety, will support. I do not particularly doubt that Sagar's explanation is in accord with Lawrence's intention, or even that Lawrence may have felt that what Sagar suggests is what the poem says, but I think in the face of its inconsistency, we must seek the unity of the poem in its psychology rather than its doctrine. If we are willing to accept this, then we can see that the poem's aesthetic inconsistency is to be accounted for by Lawrence's psychological inability to face the symbolic import of his own act. Having mocked Freud by the mechanism of dividing the mother into two aspects, Lawrence reacts compulsively and in horror to the castrating aspect as a result of his identification with the snake. To distance himself from recognizing this identification, he then casts himself as the snake's inferior, using demeaning terminology in reference to himself and simultaneously strengthening and recalling his earlier recognition of the snake as a god by calling him now "one of the lords / Of life."

The strategy, unsuccessful in terms of the aesthetic consistency of the poem, reveals to us the profundity of the poet's anxiety. That the poem could be written at all testifies to the success of the strategy psychologically. The greatness of Lawrence's "Snake" lies not in its expression of Lawrentian "doctrine," but in the courage it demonstrates in presenting a traumatic incident with utter fidelity to its psychological dynamics.

NOTES

¹ Keith Sagar, The Art of D. H. Lawrence, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 124-125.

² See: Frederick J. Hoffman, "Lawrence's Quarrel with Freud," Freudianism and the Literary Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957); Claudia C. Morrison, Freud and the Critic: The Early Use of Depth Psychology in Literature Criticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), pp. 203-210; James C. Cowan, D. H. Lawrence's American Journey: A Study in Literature and Myth (Cleveland and London: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1970), pp. 15-24.

³ D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1921), p. 15.

⁴ All quotations from "Snake" are from The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, eds. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts (New York: Viking Press, 1971).

⁵ D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1921), pp. 2-3.