Several+of+Nature's+People

**"Several of Natures People**"
The fifth stanza of the poem finds the speaker abruptly back in the present, asserting — again in the polite language of refined society — his connections with the realm of nature:

“**Several of Nature’s People**/ I know, and they know me.” The speaker insists that his feelings for these inhabitants of nature are ones characterized by “**cordiality**.” This assertion,

however, is contradicted in the final stanza by the speaker’s depiction of the effect on him each time he encounters the snake: chilling terror (“a tighter breathing/ And Zero at the

Bone”). What begins as a poem ostensibly about a snake becomes, in this way, a poem about the effect of an encounter with a snake — and perhaps by extension with nature itself —

on an individual human being.

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