It’s interesting to see the places where an artist’s imagination might fall a little short. As an Alabama kid, I can’t help noticing that for William Blake, one of those places is snakes, in realistic rather than visionary form. Even in London (as I am now), I carry my ingrained habit of scanning the ground in front of me for a wrinkle of banded back, a sudden motion in the leaves, even on a Tube platform or the tiles of the British Library plaza, where I pass under the eyes of Blake’s Newton (as rendered by Eduardo Paolozzi), reminded that not all things in the world are subject to logic. Blake, a London boy through and through, wouldn’t have seen a snake anywhere other than one of the public menageries at the Tower of London or on Exeter ‘Change. A Biblical snake, a metaphorical snake, a visionary snake – that he can do. But a real one….

Of course, Blake has great form as a depicter of mythic, fierce serpents (sometimes happily controlled by children.) When Blake is tasked as a “freelance creative” (in John Riordan’s apt phrase) with illustrating John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative (1796), one of the episodes he chooses is Stedman’s killing of a giant snake in Surinam, hung from a tree and skinned. (“I had a Je ne say qwoy about me,” Stedman brags elsewhere in the book, “of the fasquinating kind, which attracted the girls as the eye of the Rattlesnake attrakts Squirls, and unaccountably persuades them to submission” [XVIII]).

Zoom in and you can see the snake (like the Tyger) has a faint, helpless smile:

So perhaps this is why, in 1800-1803, living in the village of Felpham and illustrating his patron William Hayley’s Ballads, Founded on Some Anecdotes Relating to Animals (1805), Blake does the brave dog leaping into the crocodile-infested waters to show his heedless master there’s danger ahead (that crocodile is a classic Blake visionary serpent):

He does the eagle:

He does a dog and an eagle:

And he does a wonderful horse:

The lion, maybe not so much:

There is a nice (and Songs-of-Experience-reminiscent) Tiger (in the Blake Archive, but not in the copy I’m holding) – perhaps inspired by the little white kitten Hayley’s friend John Marsh of Chichester gave the Blakes for their cottage:

Although it’s also not in the copy I’m holding at the British Library, Blake did create an Elephant (about an elephant who saves a kind human from a tiger by picking him up with his trunk and setting him in a window, out of harm’s way):

But for the rhyming tale of“The Grateful Snake” (named Zoe), Blake seems to have bowed out (what wouldn’t you give to see him draw this?!)  In “The Grateful Snake,” a snake and boy grow up together as friends before they are separated by the boy’s parents, who, weirded out, give both the boy and snake an opiate (?!) to send the boy to sleep in the house and sent the snake away into the woods. One day, the boy – now grown up, but still kind to animals – is set upon by two robbers when, suddenly, the robbers are, in turn, “beaten to the ground” and boa-constricted by – you guessed it – Zoe, the Grateful Snake. (An excellent fellow Blakean, met serendipitously in the British Library yesterday, tells me that “Zoe” and “Eve” both come from the same Hebrew root, meaning “life.” The Hebrew Bible’s translators into Greek used “Zoe” as an early stand-in for “Eve.”) I have to wonder: why didn’t Zoe just “bruise his heel,” or bite him, Curse-of-Cain style? But imagining a snake beating a person to the ground is a fun mental exercise…

In Leslie Marmon Silko’s wonderful memoir The Turquoise Ledge, you learn that turquoise in all its varieties (different shades of blue, green, brown, and even black and white) is a sign of where water has evaporated, leaving its mineral content behind. You also learn that rattlesnakes can be grateful. In the book, Silko describes freeing one of the many rattlers living on her Arizona desert property from mesh netting by placing a forked stick over its neck (knowing, even as she reached down, how fragile that defense was) and sliding a blade between the snake’s skin and the plastic thread (!) and cutting the creature loose. In her account, the snake seems (like animals in distress do sometimes) to have sensed she was there to help, and lay still. Once freed, the snake slithered away, and as I remember the book, held back from striking whenever Silko accidentally came near afterwards in the yard, giving small rattles to alert her. So maybe Zoe, the Grateful Snake, was not entirely fictional!

If you’re an Alabama child, you learn from birth to be wary – but also respectful, and vaguely wondrous – of snakes, and to tell the difference between them at a glance. King snakes, rat snakes, black racers, the endangered indigo snake: not a problem, unless you are a little creature who can fit down a steadily unhinging jaw. Copperheads are bad but generally not fatal. Deeply feared, because most territorial, venomous, and aggressive, are water moccasins, aka cottonmouths, blending precisely with the muddy, sun-dappled waters they prefer. Rattlesnakes are feared, but also – especially among older people I know – respected. Perhaps this is game recognizing game: older, bigger rattlers, having learned from age and experience, tend to save their venom for when they really mean it. But like the Aztecs, whose massive brown stone rattlesnake sculpture (ca. 1325-1521) still (rightly) fills visitors to the British Museum with unease…

or like Odysseus (or Captain Ahab) setting out onto the wine-dark sea, where Leviathan and other monsters wait… (I’m going to see it on Saturday!)

rural Southerners hold a place of complex awe in our minds -sharing borders, perhaps, with a desert-prophet, Old Testament, Flannery O’Connor-esque God – for the truly big rattlesnake. Like this one, found on my late father’s phone. Yes, it is real.

When he made a marvelous series of relief etchings and woodcuts for his edition of the Bible, Tennessee native, onetime would-be Methodist minister, and fellow Auburn graduate Barry Moser knew exactly what Jesus had to face during his forty days in the wilderness. (And among his magnificent body of work are images for DRACULA, DR. JEKYLL AND MR HYDE, and FRANKENSTEIN!!)

Which is totally in line with the Bible itself, teeming with rich and wondrous images of the natural world as reality and metaphor. Knowing it backwards and forwards, Blake would have known not only the central snake (illustrated here for Milton’s Paradise Lost):

But also, among so many others, Proverbs 30 (an obvious influence on his own “Proverbs of Hell:” ):

⁸ There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not:

¹⁹ The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.

⁴ There be four things which are little upon the earth, but they are exceeding wise:

²⁵ The ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat in the summer;

²⁶ The conies are but a feeble folk, yet make they their houses in the rocks;

²⁷ The locusts have no king, yet go they forth all of them by bands;

²⁸ The spider taketh hold with her hands, and is in kings’ palaces.

And the famous injunction of Jesus to his disciples in Matthew 10:16:

¹⁶ Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.

Overall, when I put snakes, Blake, the Bible, and Alabama together in my mind, they all point in the same direction: the world is large and terrible but also marvelous. So consider what mysteries – particularly in the natural world – are always pointing to: the direction of discovery, of danger, of wonder, and to the very Blakean place where they overlap, coil on coil, watching us, still, with bright and sleepless eyes.