In Snake, by D.H.

Lawrence, the free verse is aptly used to describe the personal and intimate conflict of the first person narrator and his conflicting thoughts. In contrast, Snow, by Amy Lowell, is focuses primarily on observation and reflection of a single event throughout the whole poem, and thus not truly a direct utterance of the instant. In Snake, the narrators thoughts about the snake change as he debates whether to follow social instruction or his own inherent thoughts. In this immediate living response, the free verse flows with a strong purpose. It creates a conversational and conscious-driven tone to pull the reader into the narrators thoughts, which feel more rhythmically authentic. The freedom in line length is shown most evidently in the single word line Silently, which through its own silent pause, gives a strong impression of both gentleness and sinister danger. This relates to how the narrator wishes to respect the snake, but society teaches that because the snake is dangerous, it should be killed. With free verse, the narrator often begins a line and even sentences and paragraphs with and, which is grammatically incorrect, yet common in thought and speech. When this is used in And as he put his head, the conjunction links the new paragraph with the previous, creating a sense of stream of consciousness or the thoughts of the moment. The tone is made more colloquial, and therefore more genuine. This is furthered with the chronological ordering of the poem which further allows the reader to truly travel with the narrator in his thoughts. Throughout the free verse are examples of synthesised structure, such as the use of the triad in Was it cowardice was it perversity was it humility? and the resulting parallelism. This rare regular form mimics the instant thoughts of the mind in that we often think in terms of three when we list things to ourselves. Nonetheless, the lack of restraint of the free verse is generally more characteristic of thought, and appropriately, is more abundant. The repeated use of enjambment creates irregular pauses which match the flow of conscious thought, which is never pre-planned or fully consistent. This absence of regular form does indeed create some sense of confusion, some discord, which lends well to the conflicting voices that the narrator hears: societys demand to kill the snake, and his own instinct to respect life. The free verse works effectively as an agent to convey the instancy of these thoughts, as the narrator chronologically works through a full event and plot. In Snow, the narrator is less involved in the poem and instead passively reflects and observes. A interesting key difference between Snow and Snake is that Snow is written in the present tense, which seemingly captures the essence of free verse being from the instant. This idea of the instant is, however, different here in Snow, as it is not so much the instancy of the narrators thoughts, but rather the instancy of what is happening in the environment. The poem consists of a response to a single, one dimensioned event the falling of a snow and consequently there is a lack of progression or change: throughout the whole poem the narrator feels nothing but sadness at the decay which the snow symbolises. In comparison, the narrator of Snake shifts between

alternating feelings of surprise, curiousness, honour, confusion, horror and regret. The lines of

Snow, the rhythmic unit of free verse, are generally shorter in length when compared to Snake,
and usually consist of one clause. Such can be found in the statement: Long ago, / On nights like this, / Wolves howled among these trees. After each clause the reader must pause and this creates a sense of deliberateness, as each snipet of idea is independent, planned and thought out. Contrast this with the stream of consciousness and intimate, more free-flowing thoughts of the first person narrator in Snake. The use of free verse here then becomes less of a direct utterance of the instant as the feeling of the poem progressing through with spontaneous[ness], as D.H. Lawrence wrote, is less pronounced. The thoughts and insights which the narrator explores are characteristic of reflection, as the event of the snow falling occurred yesterday, or the recent past. For example, the narrator concludes by linking the decay of the snow which has been implied throughout the entire narrative to firstly a continent, then the Earth, and then the cosmos. Such a grand and illuminative statement was reached only at the end of the poem after such lengthy thought about all the other local effects of the snow. On the other hand, the feelings expounded in

Snake are immediate responses to the situation at present, even though the tense is of the past,
because the narrator voice is capturing what happened at each instant of the encounter with the snake which unlike the mere falling of snow, has a clear exposition, section of rising tension, climax, and resolution. This feeling of reflection in Snow does not quite fit with Lawrences idea that free verse must be direct utterance of the instant. Even though a sense of instancy is created with the event which is being observed, the nature of the direct utterances, or the thoughts of the narrator, is not instant and rather reflective and thought out. To answer whether poetry needs to consist of direct utterances of the instant, which are characteristic of free verse, we must look at how well each poem uses free verse to further their respective ideas. Snake seems to more effectively capture the essence of the conflicting thoughts of the narrator through the elements of instancy and confusion in free verse than Snow does, because in Snow the free verse does not seem to work as well in creating a sense of sadness and decay it seems to not have any clear purpose. For such a reflective and formal tone, a more organised structure could arguably work better. The poem does not quite require the instinctiveness found in free verse and Snake. Snow serves as evidence to show that poetry does not have to consist of direct utterances of the instant, because without such characteristics of free verse, its purpose could very well have been more convincingly portrayed.