Serpents

Serpents are a recurring image in “The Golden Apples,” where a snake at the tree’s root belongs to a garden of golden fruit, water, leaves, grass, and a woman beneath the branches. The image does not remain a single, stable emblem: it is named, seen in the shapes around it, and absorbed into a pattern that Roland Michell eventually reads as part of the poem’s living language. Its significance lies in this movement between creature and form, and between an individual image and the world of relations that gives it meaning.

The Serpent in the Garden

The poem places the serpent at the tree’s root, alongside the golden fruit and the woman in the shadow of the boughs. Elsewhere, its scene takes in silvery water, the beast’s scales, green leaves, curving branches, grass, and globes of gold shining in leafy shadow. The serpent is therefore neither isolated nor merely decorative: it belongs to a densely composed landscape whose parts gather around the tree and fruit.

That landscape also makes the creature difficult to separate from its surroundings. The branches are described as serpentining, and the woman’s arms are seen in the same sinuous terms. The serpent’s shape passes into boughs and bodily gesture; the natural scene seems to repeat a curve across distinct forms. Rather than presenting a clean boundary between animal, plant, and human figure, the poem lets their likenesses draw them into one another.

Naming and the Making of a World

The serpent is also part of a reflection on language. The poem says that the first men named the place and the world, making words for the garden and tree, for dragon or snake, and for the woman, grass, and gold. Naming places the snake among the basic terms through which a world becomes intelligible. The word identifies a creature, but the poem’s later images make it resonate beyond that single referent.

This expansion is not a simple replacement of the animal by a symbol. The serpent remains a creature with scales, while its winding shape is recognized in branches and arms. Meaning emerges through these correspondences and contrasts: water is silvery beside the scales, green leaves frame golden fruit, and a woman’s arms echo the tree’s curves. The image works relationally, acquiring force through its place among the garden’s other forms rather than carrying a fully separate meaning on its own.

A Whole Made of Interwoven Forms

As the garden grows more distinct in the poem, its elements also become more intertwined. Tree, fruit, fountain, woman, grass, and serpent appear as parts of one whole. The serpentining branches and arms are a particularly clear instance of that double movement: each remains recognizable, yet their shared shape binds them together. The creature’s image helps the poem imagine a world in which difference persists without requiring isolation.

The garden’s enclosure sharpens this effect. Dark boughs weave a fence around the grass and make a sacred place for the fruit, whose golden globes shine like small suns in leafy caverns. The serpent belongs to this setting of boundaries and connections: it is associated with the tree’s root, while its form recurs in the branches that enclose the garden. The scene thus gathers living forms into a coherent pattern without reducing them to identical things.

Roland’s Rereading

When Roland reads or rereads “The Golden Apples,” he sees the tree, fruit, fountain, woman, grass, and serpent as singular and multiple in form. The repeated image of the serpent helps register the difference between recognizing a creature and noticing a shape moving through the poem’s language. Roland hears Randolph Henry Ash’s voice, but also hears language weaving patterns beyond the reach of any one writer or reader; in that reading, the serpent is part of an active network of images rather than a clue with one final answer.

This recognition changes how Roland understands the materials that brought him to the poem. He connects its naming of the world with Giambattista Vico’s account of the first men as poets and first words as names that were also things. He also sees the relevance of the lists he had made in Lincoln, and understands that Christabel LaMotte can be read as the Muse and Proserpina while also not being reducible to either figure. The serpent’s place in the poem’s shifting pattern contributes to that insight: images can suggest one another without collapsing into a single identity.

The creature therefore marks a central tension in the poem’s vision. It is specific enough to be named as a snake and described through its scales, yet its form exceeds the animal and passes into branches and arms. In Roland’s experience of reading, that mobility is not an incidental flourish; it is evidence that the poem’s words and images are alive in relation to one another, making the garden at once a place and a structure of perception.