I Favor Dominion

When it comes to snakes, I've always favored the notion of dominion, so I'm called up short when I read Kunitz in "The Snakes of September." The significant line in that poem is the isolated "After all" with its sense of summation. It calls the reader up short before it introduces the clincher: "we are partners in this land, co-signers of a covenant." The complicity of the fall narrative is reinforced by the contractual terms "partners," "co-signers," and "covenant." But Kunitz doesn't stop there. He moves to a deeper understanding of this complicity when he again references the human "touch," suggesting its ultimate relationship with "the wild braid of creation." Both "trembles" and "braid" figure collusion between man and nature that is both sacred and irrevocable.

The climax of the poem is heightened by the narrator's description of a summer-long cohabitation with the snakes. Using the playful verbs "rustling" and "outracing," the narrator suggests a comfortable game between the two parties. The repetitive nouns "whisper," "signal," and "shadow" are emphasized by placement and suggest the engagement with which the snakes play out their role in the garden.

The tension increases in the poem when the defiance of the snakes is introduced. Conventional wisdom suggests to the narrator that with the coming of fall the snakes should have disappeared, but these two have rejected the blood-call of hibernation for a very different stirring of the blood. In a "brazen love-knot" they dangle in the sun, "the deceptive balm of noon." The suggestion of the "deceptive" pulls the reader back to the violation of the common curse man and snake experienced in that other garden.

The narrative reaches its apex when the man reaches out to "stroke the fine, dry grit of their skins." He defiantly touches the seeming untouchable.