Roethke's Snake: an Analysis

Within the poem "Snake" by Theodore Roethke, he may be referring to himself as the young snake who reaches out for acceptance of his society in his naturally occurring or atypical state. However, it seems as if he is constrained: "limp on a stone, a thin mouth and a tongue stayed, in the still air," unable to talk or act out in society. I find that this correlates with American literature as it supports a component of what McTeague provides - the idea of the lack of an identity, similarly to McTeague, which obstructs a person from having any particular influence in a society filled with money-hungry, greedy people. The idea of the poem is that a new person is trying to emerge out of his previous "skin" and live the way he desires to; however, his attempts are overshadowed by the criticism around him, which disallows him from committing towards his objective. In the visual attached to the poem, the snake looks pretty confident and has nothing surrounding him besides what looks to be a string of plants in the background. This also may be tying into social darwinism which is an overwhelmingly influential element in American literature as it enabled the substandard classes of society to articulate how they felt about the money imbalance (such as Marcus in McTeague).