Snakecharmer - Analysis

A creation story where the creator is also the raw material

Central claim: Plath turns the snakecharmer into a stand-in for the artist-god who makes a world by sheer will, only to discover that what he makes is inseparable from what he is—and that the act of making can swallow the maker. The poem opens like Genesis revised: As the gods began one world, the snakecharmer begins another, not with light or land but with a snaky sphere of sound. His mouth-pipe doesn’t merely attract snakes; it engineers reality, piping green into existence until even water becomes authored and tinted by his breath.

The tone is incantatory and mildly awe-struck, but it carries an undercurrent of unease: this world is born already slippery, already too alive. Creation here is not clean separation (light from dark, land from sea) but a continuous seepage—water into reeds, reeds into necks, necks into undulations—like the world is being dreamed up by a single obsessive image.

Green as a spell: water that won’t stay water

The poem keeps returning to green as if it were the chant’s refrain: Pipes green. Pipes water. Then Pipes water green until the waters waver into reedy lengths. That wavering matters: the world the snakecharmer makes is never stable substance, only transformation. Water is halfway to plant; plant is halfway to animal; everything is halfway to snake.

This is why the snakecharmer’s power feels both grand and claustrophobic. He can pipe a place to stand on out of nothing—yet it isn’t rock or floor, only flickering grass tongues supporting his foot. Even his footing is a temporary illusion sustained by music. The poem’s marvel is also its warning: a world made purely of song is a world that can dissolve when the song stops.

The poem’s turn: when the world becomes nothing but snakes

A hinge snaps at And now nothing but snakes / Is visible. Up to that point, the charmer seems like a maker arranging images around his sons, a figure with lineage and spectators. After it, his creation takes over the visual field and begins colonizing categories. Snake-scales become Leaf and eyelid; snake-bodies become bough and breast Of tree and human. The transformations are not decorative; they erase boundaries between nature and person, outside and inside.

The tone here becomes more feverish and totalizing. The poem doesn’t say he pipes snakes into a world; it says he pipes a world that turns into snakes, until snake is the only available vocabulary. The key tension sharpens: the snakecharmer Rules the writhings, but he also lives inside this snakedom. He is sovereign and captive at once.

Eden’s navel and the wish to generate endlessly

When Plath invokes Eden's navel, she pulls the snake-world into a biblical gravity: the snake is not just an animal but a principle of origin and temptation, a twist at the center of beginnings. From that navel twist the lines / Of snaky generations, and the poem breaks into a blunt fiat: let there be snakes! It’s a parody of divine speech, but it’s also a frighteningly sincere desire for plenitude—for creation that reproduces itself beyond the maker’s continued effort.

Yet the very grammar of time—were, are, will be—is double-edged. It promises permanence, but it also implies the maker must endure the consequences of what he’s unleashed. The snakecharmer’s world is not a finished artwork he can step back from; it is an expanding ecology of his own obsession.

The maker’s fatigue: when “yawns” consume the pipe

The poem’s ending darkens not through catastrophe but through exhaustion. The snakes persist till yawns / Consume this pipe: a startling image where boredom, fatigue, or human limitation literally eats the instrument of power. The snakecharmer tires of music, and with that tiredness the world unweaves. What he once built through transformation, he now reverses through reduction: back to snake-warp, snake-weft, then to melting waters, then to Water, to green, to nothing like a snake.

This is the poem’s bleakest contradiction: the snake-world is both infinitely generative and terrifyingly fragile. It can outlast him in principle, but it cannot remain visible without his continued playing. The closing gesture—Puts up his pipe, lids his moony eye—feels less like triumph than retreat, the god-artist shutting his senses to the very world his senses made.

A sharper question the poem leaves in your lap

If everything in the poem becomes snake—leaf, eyelid, bough, even breast—what exactly is the snakecharmer creating: an external world, or a total projection of his own snake-rooted mind? The poem keeps granting him mastery (Rules the writhings) while showing how quickly that mastery narrows into a single, consuming image. By the time he stops playing, the question isn’t whether the world disappears, but whether there was ever anything there that wasn’t his music wearing a snake-skin.