Snake by D. H. Lawrence
Quick answer: Snake by D. H. Lawrence: full summary, the voice of education, guilt and the pettiness theme, plus analysis and exam answers for this free verse classic.
A man in pyjamas walks down to his water trough on a scorching Sicilian morning and finds a visitor drinking there first. Out of that small domestic encounter, D. H. Lawrence built one of the great moral poems of the twentieth century. 'Snake' was written while Lawrence was living in Taormina, Sicily, in the early 1920s, and published in his 1923 collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Almost nothing happens in it, a snake drinks and leaves, a log is thrown, yet a whole philosophy of instinct, education and shame plays out in front of you.
The poem appears on West Bengal Higher Secondary, CBSE and many international syllabuses. Because Lawrence published it before 1928, the poem is in the public domain, which means we can look at his actual lines rather than paraphrase around them. This guide walks through the encounter scene by scene, examines the free verse, and pulls out the craft moves a working poet can use tonight.
The poem
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
D. H. Lawrence, 'Snake' (1923)
The setting and the man
David Herbert Lawrence (1885 to 1930), a coal miner's son from Nottinghamshire, spent much of his adult life in voluntary exile, and the years around 1920 found him in Sicily, at a villa above Taormina with Mount Etna on the horizon. Birds, Beasts and Flowers, the collection this poem anchors, is his sustained attempt to look at non-human life without borrowing it for ornament: tortoises, bats, fish and figs observed on their own terms, in long unrhymed lines that owe a debt to Walt Whitman.
Lawrence believed, and argued in essay after essay, that modern schooling and social convention had cut civilised people off from their instinctive, bodily life. 'Snake' stages that argument as a two-minute incident at a water trough, with the poet as the embarrassed test subject.
What the poem says: the encounter, movement by movement
The poem opens with plain reportage: a snake has come to the speaker's water trough on a hot, hot day, and he has come down in his pyjamas to drink there too. He must wait, standing with his pitcher, because the snake was there first, a small humiliation the poem sounds twice in its opening lines. The snake has trailed down from a fissure in the earth wall, yellow-brown and soft-bellied, and it sips at the stone trough in the strange smoking stillness of a Sicilian July.
Then the schooling kicks in. The voice of his education tells the speaker that in Sicily the black snakes are innocent but the gold are venomous, and that a brave man would take a stick and kill this golden visitor. Other inner voices join in, taunting his manhood: if he were not afraid, he would finish it off. But honesty complicates the lesson. He confesses that he likes the snake, that he feels honoured his quiet guest has sought his hospitality, and he asks himself whether it is cowardice, perversity or humility that keeps him from striking. The snake, for its part, drinks its fill, looks around dreamily and flickers its black tongue, unbothered, 'like a god'.
The turn comes when the snake begins to withdraw into its horrid black hole in the wall. Something in the speaker revolts at that retreat into darkness, and in a spasm of protest he puts down his pitcher, picks up a clumsy log and throws it at the trough. He almost certainly misses, but the snake convulses in undignified haste and vanishes. Instantly the mood collapses into regret. He despises himself and the voices of his accursed human education; he thinks of the albatross, summoning Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and his murdered bird; and he wishes the snake would come back, for it now seems to him like a king in exile, due to be crowned again. The poem closes on one of the most quietly devastating self-judgments in English verse.
The voice of education: the poem's real antagonist
Exam questions circle this phrase for good reason: the snake is never the villain of 'Snake'. The antagonist is the chorus of received opinion inside the speaker's head, the accumulated instruction of school, society and inherited fear that tells him what a man must do to a venomous animal. Lawrence dramatises something most of us have felt: the gap between what we actually feel in an encounter (wonder, honour, kinship) and what we have been trained to perform (mastery, violence).
Notice that the education does not fully win. The speaker delays, argues, confesses his liking. The log is thrown only at the last moment, at the snake's tail end, almost as a token payment to the voices, and shame follows within a line.
Guilt, the albatross and the final lines
The allusion to the albatross does precise work. In Coleridge's poem, a sailor kills a harmless bird for no reason and is cursed for it; by reaching for that comparison, Lawrence's speaker convicts himself of a sin against hospitality and against life itself, not merely a lapse of manners. The snake is recast in royal terms, an exiled king of the underworld, and the speaker is left to face what he calls his own pettiness. Not evil, not cruelty: pettiness, the small-souled meanness of a man who obeyed his training instead of his awe.
The closing lines are worth setting down exactly; their collapse onto a two-word verdict is the emotional shape of the whole poem.
How it works: free verse that moves like its subject
Lawrence writes 'Snake' in open free verse: no rhyme scheme, no fixed metre, lines that stretch and contract with the action. The long lines ripple; when the snake drinks, the verse slows into repetition, and words like 'slackness' and the soft hiss of repeated s sounds let you hear the animal in the language. When the log is thrown, the lines shorten and the rhythm turns abrupt. Form imitates event throughout.
Two other devices earn marks. Repetition works as ritual: phrases return with small variations, the way a mind circles an unresolved feeling. And the imagery is organised around heat and depth, the burning day, smoking Etna, the earth's dark interior from which the snake emerges, so that the visitor seems to carry the underworld with him. The speaker's ordinary pyjamas against all this mythic furniture is Lawrence's quiet, deliberate joke.
Why it lasts
'Snake' has outlived thousands of nature poems because it refuses both available sentimentalities. It does not pretend the snake is harmless, and it does not celebrate the kill as older hunting poems did. Instead it sits in the uncomfortable middle, where most actual moral life happens, and reports the failure honestly. Readers trust the poem because the poet loses.
It has also grown timelier. A century on, the question of how humans treat the creatures that inconvenience them has moved from private conscience to planetary politics, and Lawrence's water trough reads like an early scene in that long story.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the structure: a small real event narrated moment by moment, with the inner commentary given as much space as the outer action. Most new poets summarise their incidents; Lawrence expands his, letting hesitation and self-argument become the drama. Try narrating one two-minute encounter, an insect in the kitchen, a beggar at the car window, at full length, quoting your own inner voices as characters.
Steal also the delayed verdict. The poem saves its self-judgment for the final two words, and everything before it earns that landing. If you write a poem of conscience for a contest, Writory judges score emotion and structure separately: hold your conclusion back until the last line, and make it smaller and plainer than the reader expects.
What poets can take from this
- Structure any summary answer around the three movements: the drinking, the log, the regret.
- Always identify the voice of education as the poem's antagonist, not the snake.
- Name the albatross allusion and its source, Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, for a guaranteed reference mark.
- Use the word 'expiate' in your answer and gloss it: to atone for a wrong.
- For craft questions, show how line length changes with the action; one concrete example beats three generalisations.
Try it yourself
Narrate, moment by moment, a real encounter with an animal that lasted under five minutes. Include at least two inner voices telling you what to do, quote them directly, and end the poem with a verdict on yourself of four words or fewer.
Questions
What is the theme of Snake by D. H. Lawrence?
The poem explores the conflict between natural instinct and social conditioning. The speaker's spontaneous feeling for the snake is honour and fascination, but the voices of his education order him to kill it, and his half-hearted obedience leaves him ashamed. Guilt, hospitality and respect for non-human life are the connected themes.
What form or meter is Snake written in?
Snake is written in free verse: unrhymed lines of irregular length with no fixed metre. Lawrence uses long, flowing lines and heavy repetition while the snake drinks, then short abrupt lines at the moment of violence, so the verse imitates the event. It is a standard example of expressive free verse in the Whitman tradition.
Why does the speaker throw the log at the snake?
He acts in a sudden spasm of protest as the snake withdraws into its hole, driven by the voices of his education that call the golden snakes of Sicily venomous and demand a man kill them. The act is reluctant and token, aimed as the snake is already leaving. He regrets it instantly and compares himself to the mariner who shot the albatross.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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