Dickinson's+Zero+at+the+Bone



Years ago, Daniel Hoffman called Dickinson's "Zero at the Bone" the finest image in American poetry. And that riveting image is not the only excellence in this poem. Take, for instance,

the description of the creature as a **"narrow fellow."** The adjective "narrow" is hardly unusual, but welded to "fellow" (which in this context is equally common), it takes on a visual-

kinesthetic meaning. Visually, this noun-cum-attribute recreates, in a sense, the very movement of the snake as it **"rides"** along the ground. Notice that the word **"narrow"** opens

out--that is, it stretches like a "shaft" or an arrow and ends with an o--and then the word **"fellow" closes up ("wrinkle[s]"**). The very size of the letters--all letters of a small size in the

firs tword and an organized sequence of letters of a small and a taller size in the second word--orchestrate the poet's perception of the way this creature makes its way around. In fact,

this orchestration extends to the entire first line of the poem, as we can see both in the published version and in the holograph manuscript: "A narrow Fellow in the Grass."

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