Feared and hated, snakes might just be the least popular members of the animal kingdom. The snake is the bible’s first instance of evil; tempting Eve with the apple is a crime that takes some coming back from. 3000 years have done little to make amends.
And in truth, snakes and humans are unlikely to make good friends. Yet, they share the same planet and occasionally their paths cross. The poem explores what happens when these two spheres brush past one another. “Hunting Snake” is not a poem that tries to make us love snakes or even empathise with them. Instead, the poem speaks to the ways in which humans and snakes inhabit different words and that when their paths cross, words fail.
On a surface level, we are invited to admire the snake in its beauty and power. Mid-way through the poem, the snake’s “sun-glazed [...] curves” are almost good enough to eat. The reference to the sun takes us back to the first line and connects the snake to the general delight of the “late season’s grace.” We could go on, the “diamond” scales are dazzling; the snake is “splendid.”
And yet, “splendid” is the third element of a decidedly ambivalent list: “Cold, dark and splendid.” Two of these three adjectives are negatively coded, disrupting any uncomplicatedly positive impressions of the snake. Moreover, the etymology of “splendid” (Latin, splendidus – light, shining, glittering) only adds to this contradiction. How can the snake be both dark and light? But taking the more commonplace meaning of splendid “magnificent or impressive,” the list suggests that the snake is magnificent precisely because of his coldness and darkness.
All of which suggests that the snake, in its contradictions and darkness, is not something that we can readily connect with. This sense of disconnection is at work in other places. For although the line “he quested through the parting grass” gently personifies the snake, the word “questing” evokes the fantasy genre in a manner which distances the snake from the reader. The snake is like a knight, on an adventure, but not, therefore quite of our world and not, moreover, real.
Crucially, the snake’s quest does not concern humans. The creature’s focus is fixed on its prey. We cannot be sure if he has even noticed the presence of the humans. On this point, the speaker affirms that “What track he followed, what small food / fled living from his fierce intent, / we scarcely thought.” There is a subtle nod to the different ways in which humans and snakes inhabit the world. The track that the snake is following has been left by the prey. Snakes use a sophisticated array of senses to detect scents, movement, and heat using some senses that humans simply do not possess. In this way, they can know things in the world that humans have little chance of seeing or hearing. The track that the snake follows is only a track for snakes; it does not exist for humans. The speaker admits to “scarcely” thinking about it because it is essentially unthinkable for the human.
And this unthinkability, I would suggest, extends to the snake itself. How can we think about a creature which is so alien? This problem is a cause of considerable tension in the poem. If the snake is not of our world, how can it be represented in a poem? Surely the minute we start writing about snakes, we make them into something else; we distort them into things that humans can know.
In a sense, then, nothing can be said about the snake, not without ruining it or horribly misrepresenting it. And this is perhaps why the humans in the poem have literally nothing to say about the snake. First they freeze and this paralysis is compounded by a loss of breath: “we lost breath to see him pass.” So while the snake is breathtaking in the popular sense, he is also literally breathtaking – the humans have no breath; they cannot speak.
It is striking that they say nothing about the snake, not even after he has passed and they are able to breathe again, taking “a deeper breath of day.” On the subject of the snake they remain entirely silent, aware that anything they put into words will ruin the event that they have just participated in. It would put into human words an life-form which cannot be grasped by humans.
In this sense, the real poem is the silence of the observers. The silence which contains within it the profound and unsettling experience of an encounter with a life form which cannot be fully comprehended.
Let’s end with the first line of the final stanza. “Cold, dark and splendid he was gone.” It is the enjambed meaning which is the important one. The line is paradoxical. He was gone. Gone is not something that you can be. Gone is the opposite of being. The line suggests powerfully that the second you start to describe, to form, to fix the snake, it is gone – it has slipped through your fingers. And with that, the snake has soundlessly slithered out of the poem. Leaving not words, but a wordless glance, a feeling, unspoken.
