what is the overall meaning of this poem? please help?

Question

-Slowly-

I watched a snake once, swallow a rabbit.
Fourth grade, the reptile zoo
the rabbit stiff, nose in, bits of litter stuck to its fur,

its head clenched in the wide
jaws of the snake, the snake
sucking it down its long throat.

All throat that snake, I couldn't tell
where the throat ended, the body
began. I remember the glass

case, the way that snake
took its time (all the girls, groaning, shrieking
but weren't we amazed, fascinated,

saying we couldn't look, but looking, weren't we
held there, weren't we
imagining—what were we imagining?)

Mrs. Peterson urged us to Move on, girls but we couldn't
move. It was like watching a fern unfurl, a minute
hand move across a clock. I didn't know why

the snake didn't choke, the rabbit never
moved, how the jaws kept opening
wider, sucking it down, just so

I am taking this in, slowly,
taking it into my body: this grief. How slow
the body is to realize.

You are never coming back

Answer 1

It's about coming to an understanding of death.

The rabbit is already dead when the snake's swallowing it, but the act of swallowing is symbolic of spiritual transition. The poet is reflecting on a childhood episode that mirrors his/her own emotional understanding of death- that in the end all of our bodies disappear and disintigrate, just like the rabbit's does as it's swallowed and digested.

We may continue to exist in a spiritual sense, but the body (and with it our experience of the physical world, all its colors and sensations) is "never coming back".

Answer 2

The thing about poetry is that a hundred different people can read a poem and get two hundred completely different meanings out of it. When I read it, I get the writer is trying to say something along the lines of how people are trapped in life, how they can't break free and hardly struggle to get free at times. And that though there are other people watching, they don't do anything to help. In that sense, this poem would be a metaphor for life. Or it could be about a child's first experience with death and the questions that come along with that, "Why isn't the rabbit struggling?"

So just read it a few times and take your first thought (not considering, of course, the "What in the world is this" initial reaction) and think about it, expand on it, and find out what the poem means to you.

Hope this helps!

Answer 3

I love the first answer, LOL funny!

But basically it is about death. The picture of our fascination with death, and how unreal it seems to us. The ending, of course, is a dead giveaway, if you pardon the pun. The author is comparing the snake swallowing the rabbit to her own difficulty processing of the knowledge of the death of her loved one.
Have you ever noticed that most poems are about death? If you answer "death" you will be right 99% of the time, LOL

Answer 4

It could be about an unscrupulous person, who is also selfish taking advantage of another, who is innocent and hence is naive and trusting.
This poem could also mean what it is saying, a child's first experience with predator and prey. A child's experience with the death of one to continue the life of another. A statement that is factual in reality. Some of to die, fall from grace or stature or be destroyed for others to live.

Answer 5

It is probably the child's first encounter with death. This may trigger in the child's memory that the bunny is never going to come back because the snake needed to eat it in order to survive.

Answer 6

meditation on the stages of grief over the death of a loved one...

Answer 7

The rabbit died!