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SNAKES BY A.K. RAMANUJAN

 The poem “Snakes” is selected from his first collection The Striders. It presents the speaker’s memory of his childhood life where the sight of snakes has made everlasting imprints. At the very beginning of the poem, he tells us that he recalls the sight of snakes while walking not through jungle but through the museum of quartzes or aisles of book stacks. Though uncurved and opaque, ‘golden / yellow colour’ of the book spine reminds him of the twirls of their hisses rise like the tiny dust cones on slow-noon roads winding through the farmer’s feet.

These snakes appear to him ridiculous and alien like some terrible aunt. He also recalls an Indian ritual where cobras are worshipped as gods. He remembers his mother who gives milk in saucers to the snakes. She bears the black –line design etched on the brass of the saucer by the snakes. He recalls awesome writhing of snakes around snake - man’s neck who tolerates this for his father’s smiling money’.The image of ‘snake’ reminds him his sister’s braid that gleams with new hairpins. The licking, writhing, slushing sucking hissing snakes appear as a water bleached lotus - stalk. They have green white belly. Fear for them looms large, and he wishes to escape from them.

At the end of the poem, it appears that in the moments of much fear and anxiety his click shod heel strikes and slushes on snake, and the poet finds the harmless dead body of snakes as a sausage rope on which frogs hop. Drained out of the fear of snakes, the poet feels that now ‘I can walk through the woods’.

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