Both of the poems, ‘Snake’ and ‘The Early Purges’, both have links to animals in them. One of them having love for an animal the other hating and demeaning the animals. Whereas the poem, ‘The Early Purges’, is about animals which are put to death because they were needless in the human life. These are both contrasting views on the animals that are seen in both of the different poems.
The poem, ‘Snake’, is set in the poet’s backyard, where there is a water-trough. When the poet goes to the trough to fill a pitcher with water, he encounters a snake which has come to the trough before him. The entire poem revolves around this very encounter. Throughout the poem, the poet shows loves for the Snake and praising it like a God.
Lawrence has mixed feelings in the poem about how he feels about the snake throughout the poem. This makes the tone of this poem quite ambiguous. This is because of the ambiguity in the poet’s attitude to the snake. At first, he is scared of the snake and hears voices in his head asking him to kill it when Lawrence says, “And voices in me said, If you were a man you would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.” However, in time, he realises that it is a beautiful and harmless creature, and feels honoured at it’s coming to his trough. This led to him being filled with regret and guilt for hitting the snake, towards the end of the play and making it crawl back to its crack in the wall. This forms the effect of confusion for the poet and also forms confusion in the heads of the reader; on how to feel about this deadly, but charming creature looming in the garden.
Lawrence also describes the snakes shape and movement when he says, “Strange scented shade” on line 4 . This quote mirrors the slow movement of a slithering snake beautifully. We also see him describing the movement throughout the second stanza by the way the poem develops, with varying line length, plus sibilance when he says, “Strange-scented shade”. This gives the effect of how the snake moves around the garden, and forms an image in our heads as to what the snake looks like.
In stanzas 2 and 3, Lawrence gives a vivid description of the snake by using suggestive expressions. “And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down” The word soft is not usually related to a snake as they are seen as hard and scary creatures to many people, due to their abnormal looks in comparison to other animals in the animal kingdom. The use of sibilance is seen often in this stanza. Also, the over use of the letter ’s’, is sibilance to describe how the snake sounds, “Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body, Silently.” In this stanza there is also a lot of use of personification when Lawrence says, “And rested his throat upon the stone bottom” This personification of the snake is there to make the snake seem more natural and something to respect, rather than something to be scared or frightened by, which is how people would usually view this creature. We see this reference to the snake being a dark and scary creature when Lawrence says, “He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom” The word gloom is accounted to the darkness of the world, which is something negative. This snake seems to be some kind of being that is seen as a God that has come from the underworld or even possibly a Devil like creature.
Lawrence forms a sort of tension between the views on if the snake is a good or a bad thing. “Was it perversity that I longed to talk to him….”There’s a tension set up by these various voices within the narrative. One wants to kill the snake, the other wants to honour it. The former is born of superiority, the latter of equality. In the constant war between humans and nature the snake is seen as little more than vermin, something to fear and loathe and ultimately destroy. What would be the consequences of extermination? Lawrence’s poem captures this issue and puts it in front of the reader in clear human and environmental terms. Coming across a poisonous snake in Sicily is not all that rare. However, meeting a snake that has come for a drink at a shared water trough is something special. Water is what gives man life, but the man here is the potential life taker. Mount Etna’s distant eruptions add a powerful backdrop. A God of the Underworld has arrived and both man and earth are trembling, barely able to control their views on what is upon them.
Lawrence links his poem, ‘Snake’, to another poem called “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, which was written by Coleridge. We see this relation when Lawrence states, “And I thought of the albatross.” This poem in which there is a mariner or sailor, who during a voyage shoots an Albatross randomly and without motive on, the deck of the ship. An Albatross is a sign of good luck for a sailor. Like the ancient mariner, the poet feels guilt for killing the snake, just like how the mariner feels after killing the Albatross. This links the two poems together as they both contain guilt for hurting an animal.
There is an emphasis on the indecisiveness of the speaker, as he waivers all throughout the poem until it is too late for his opinion to matter. When he speaks of the snake it is clear that he is pleased with the snake’s company, while also torn as to whether or not he should interact with nature in this way. When he states, “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…’ he reveals his feeling in a way that a deeper sense of guilt or shame in wanting to befriend the snake. He uses the word “confess” as opposed to simply stating his feeling about the element of nature. There is a shame that is implicated in the preservation of nature as if it is a threat to his manhood. Even after he confesses his delight and honour in spending time with the snake he reverts to questioning whether or not he is a coward because he chose not to kill him.
Moving onto “The Early Purges” by Seamus Heaney which is about the childhood of the poet. The main basis of the poem is on the killing of kittens, very soon in their lives. The poet at the beginning is scared by this cruelty, but as it nears the end he becomes more used to it. The poet overcomes his natural terror and horror at the killing of kittens, when he becomes an adult.
Seamus shows us how feels about the kittens who are drowning when he says, “A frail metal sound.” The use of the word frail is used to draw attention to the fact that these kittens have no strength, due to the harshness of this event that the kitten are having to undertake. Even though they are young and newly born kittens, which would usually be full of energy, now they are coming to the end of their lives and more like an older cat, frail and crippled. Heaney makes the readers feel sadness for these newly born kittens here, due to their new and fresh life being taken away from them so quickly.
Another thing to shows how Seamus feels about the Kittens from when he says, “The scraggy wee shits” This bad language is used to describe Taggart’s own view of hatred towards these kittens. His bad language shows his strong distaste for the kittens and gives the reader a negative view on Taggart himself. Taggart here insults the animals, and even speaks this coarse language around a 6 year old Heaney. Both his words and actions are extremely harsh and coarse.
Heaney describes what the dead Kittens look like when he states that they are, “Glossy and dead” This is another oxymoron, where there are two opposites. They can’t be glossy and dead. This is contradictory of one another. Their life was once bright, but now dead
Seamus describes how the Kittens are killed and what is sounds like when he says, “Their tiny din”. This is also the use of an oxymoron. The use of “tiny” is their to emphasise the size of these newly born Kittens, but still the noise they make during this horrible event is immense. This makes the reader feel sad and distraught for the kittens and what they are having to go through.
Heaney shows us how the young boy is feeling when he says, “Suddenly frightened” The young boy is so shocked by what he has seen that he spends several days returning to the yard to look at the dead kittens. This shows us that the young boy is struggling to come to terms with what has happened. However, the kittens’ bodies are then painted as fading into the background by turning ‘mealy and crisp as old summer dung’ – they are already on the dungheap, and have now changed until they look like any other waste.
Heaney also uses imagery here to be representative of the event’s effect upon the speaker, as he gradually gets over the shock of the first killings “Until I forget them”. Of course, emotions come flooding back each time the speaker is forced to confront of the killing of animals on the farm. We see this when he is upset when Dan Taggart ‘trapped big rats’, ‘snared rabbits’ and ‘shot crows’, and is particularly affected by the way the ‘old hens’ are killed. All of these animals are killed because they serve no purpose: the rats, rabbits and crows are pests, and the old hens are being killed when they can no longer produce eggs; the kittens were drowned for the simple reason that they, like the other animals mentioned, were of no benefit to the farm.
To conclude, “The Early Purges” and “Snake” talk about present animals in different lights.
“The Early Purges” shows hatred for the Kittens that are born and a bred on this farm. Even though at the beginning of the poem when the poet is younger, he loves the animals; at the end he absolutely has no feelings for them or care. It is a normal thing for these animals to be put to death now for Heaney and he does not blink an eye at it now. However, in “Snake” all there is, is love for this animal. The poet treats the snake like a God and has so much love for it. He does feel anger for the snake at one part when he throws the log at the snake, but right after he feels pain, guilt and sorrow for what he has just done.
Therefore, we can see that both these poems present animals in different light. One showing love and affection for the animal in question and the other showing hatred and no care whatsoever for the animal.