Emily Dickinson

A Snake

A SNAKE.

swamp with its secrets

Dickinson lived in Amherst, Massachusetts—no swamps. This is imaginative landscape, not observation. The swamp represents something psychologically murky.

SWEET is the swamp with its secrets,
Until we meet a snake;
'T is then we sigh for houses,
And our departure take
At that enthralling gallop

enthralling gallop

"Enthralling" means captivating but also enslaving. The child's terror is both frightening and exhilarating—she can't choose to stop running.

That only childhood knows.

summer's treason

Treason requires betrayal by one of your own. The snake belongs to summer—warm-blooded season, life season—but breaks summer's promise of safety.

A snake is summer's treason,
And guile is where it goes.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Snake as Psychological Event

This isn't a nature poem—it's about how quickly safety becomes danger. The first two lines establish the swamp as "sweet" with attractive "secrets," a place of mystery worth exploring. Then "Until we meet a snake" undoes everything in five words. The entire emotional landscape inverts.

Notice "we sigh for houses"—not 'run home' but *sigh for* them. Houses represent civilization, safety, the known world. The snake makes us nostalgic for constraint. Dickinson spent most of her adult life inside her father's house, rarely leaving. For her, houses weren't prisons but fortresses.

The "gallop" is pure childhood physicality—not a walk or run but that specific headlong flight where your legs barely keep up with your panic. Dickinson calls it something "only childhood knows" because adults have learned to control their terror, to walk away calmly. Children still have access to pure flight response. She's not being nostalgic here; she's naming something childhood has that adulthood loses.

Treason and Guile

The final couplet makes the snake abstract. "Summer's treason" personifies the season—summer is a kingdom, and the snake is its traitor. This matters because treason is betrayal from within. The snake isn't an invader; it belongs to summer, emerges from summer's own warmth. The season that promises growth and life produces the threat.

"Guile is where it goes" is deliberately vague. Does it mean the snake brings deception wherever it travels? Or that it goes to places where trickery lives? The grammar refuses to clarify. This vagueness is the point—the snake represents not just physical danger but epistemological uncertainty. You can't pin down exactly what it means or where it's going. Like the serpent in Eden, it makes knowledge itself suspect.