Snakes
Write the shape of pure movement, older than Eden and still shedding its meanings.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about snakes: charged imagery, craft techniques, cliches to avoid, exercises and prompts, all in this free Writory guide for poets.
What this theme is
No animal arrives in a poem carrying more baggage. The snake enters trailing Eden, ouroboros, medicine staffs, temple nagas and a million shudders, and the poet's first job is to decide how much of that luggage to keep. Underneath the mythology is an animal of astonishing economy: a muscle that travels without legs, swallows without hands, and reads the air with its tongue. The real snake is stranger than the symbolic one.
The theme's core is the meeting: the moment a walking human and a flowing reptile notice one another and everything pauses. That instant, fear, awe, respect, revulsion, the ancient jolt down the spine, is where snake poems live. Emily Dickinson caught it forever in her narrow fellow in the grass, whose sudden presence leaves the speaker with a tighter breathing, and what she called zero at the bone.
Why poets return to it
Poets write snakes to explore instinct, the responses in us older than reasoning. A snake poem can examine fear honestly, or examine what our fear makes us do, which is often worse than anything the snake does. D. H. Lawrence built his most famous poem on exactly that shame: a snake drinking at his water-trough like a guest, the voices of his education telling him to kill it, and the pettiness he felt after throwing the log.
The theme also offers renewal without sentimentality. A creature that sheds its entire skin and slides on, leaving a perfect ghost of itself in the grass, gives poems about change an image that never goes soft. Judges reading for theme and emotion notice when a poet takes the snake seriously instead of reaching for the nearest villain.
Where it comes from
The snake may be poetry's oldest symbol, coiled through Gilgamesh, where it steals the plant of immortality, through Genesis, through the world-serpents of Norse and Aztec myth, and through South Asian traditions where nagas guard water and treasure and are honoured with festivals. Milton gave the serpent civilisation's most seductive speech, and the animal has been paying for it since.
The modern turn belongs to Dickinson's electric encounter and Lawrence's guilty hospitality, both poems insisting on the actual animal in actual grass or at an actual trough. A. K. Ramanujan later braided snakes through memories of a South Indian childhood, fear and ritual in the same basket. The tradition keeps proving one point: the snake rewards poets who look, and punishes those who merely recoil.
The elements that carry it
- Movement itself: the S-curve, the pour, the ripple through grass, motion as liquid muscle.
- The shed skin, translucent, complete, abandoned, is the theme's great image of renewal and of what we leave behind.
- The forked tongue tasting the air offers an alien sensorium and a chance to redeem a slandered organ.
- Heat and stillness: basking stones, dusty paths, the coiled spring of a body at rest.
- The human reaction, raised hoe, held breath, backward step, belongs in the frame; snake poems are usually double portraits.
Techniques that work
- Let syntax slither: long, winding, enjambed sentences that pour down the page can enact the animal better than any adjective.
- Use sound deliberately, sibilance is almost compulsory, so ration it; two well-placed hisses outperform a whole basket of s-sounds.
- Write the encounter in real time, second by second, and let the poem's turn be the human's choice: strike, retreat or watch.
- If you invoke Eden or myth, invert or interrogate it; the inherited script is only interesting when questioned.
- Give the snake its biology, the jaw's slow yawn, the ghost skin, the tongue's chemistry, and let symbolism rise from fact.
Mistakes to avoid
- Automatic villainy: evil, sly, treacherous. These are theology, not zoology, and the poem should know the difference.
- Sibilance overdose, every line hissing like a punctured tyre. Restraint keeps the sound uncanny instead of comic.
- Skipping the body. A snake poem with no physical snake, only symbolism, is an essay in disguise.
- Borrowing Eden without paying: if the serpent tempts someone in your poem, the poem must discover something the myth has not already told us.
An exercise
Find a shed snakeskin, a photograph will do, and describe it for twelve lines without naming the snake: a transparent glove of a body, a left-behind self. In the last two lines, let the poem admit what it is really about.
A challenge
Rewrite a famous serpent, Eden's, a fairground charmer's, a myth of your own tradition's, from the snake's side of the story, once a day for five days. Keep the version that surprised you most.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about finding a snake asleep in a place that belongs to your daily life, a shoe rack, a garden tap, a temple step, and the sixty seconds during which you decide what kind of person you are.
Before you submit
- No “evil,” “sly” or “treacherous” describing the animal.
- Sibilance is rationed and deliberate.
- The snake has at least two accurate physical behaviours.
- Any mythic material is questioned, not just quoted.
- The encounter changes or exposes the human speaker in some way.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.