Encountering the Snake

I want to do a bit of analysis on "Snake" before today's class, so I am turning to a scholarly article titled "D. H. Lawrence's 'Snake': The Edenic Myth Inverted", by David Thomas. Clearly, the encounter with the snake in Lawrence's poem is in contrast to the experience Adam and Eve had with the snake in the Garden of Eden; Lawrence gives us an "inversion" of the myth. Some of the examples of "inversion" in the poem include: no formal announcements of covenant, which normally parallel the Adam and Eve story. There is the "great dark carob tree" but it doesn't represent the "tree of knowledge" because it holds a minor significance in Lawrence's poem. In the poem, the snake consumes water, reversing the typical roles of consumption, suggesting that the snake is the one who suffers from the "fall". Furthermore, the snake is not the deceiver, and he is speaking to a man, not a woman.

As we have mentioned there are "tensions" in Lawrence's poetry, a tension in "Snake" is the idea that the man in the poem sees the snake as "one of the lords of life". With this, there is an effect that the person conversing with the snake has rejected the "life-divine", severing ties with potential redemption and salvation. The snake becomes divine rather than satanic, and the relationship between the snake and man is considered--through the reverse of the Biblical story. Therefore, I think Lawrence is (thus again) establishing tensions and complications often found in his work, through the poem "Snake".