Maxwell Bodenheim (1892–1954) was an American modernist poet and novelist associated first with the Chicago literary renaissance and later with Greenwich Village bohemia. His early work appeared in Poetry magazine and gained attention for its blend of lyricism and unsparing irony. “Rattlesnake Mountain Fable I” arrives from that early-twentieth-century experimental current, in the years after the First World War, when fable and myth were often recast in stripped-down free verse to question old certainties. The poem’s animal fable shape and uncompromising ending belong to this mode: it borrows the clarity of a children’s tale and turns it toward something unresolved and dark.
The narrative is deceptively simple. A rabbit, “rounded to a wide eyed clownishness,” watches the sky and imagines it as an “angelic / Pasture stripped to phantom tranquility,” a place where one could “nibble thoughtfully.” This is no grand religious vision; heaven is reimagined as endless grazing, peaceful and almost comic. Yet the rabbit feels trapped in his “mild furtiveness” and longs to speak to “a boldness puzzled by his flesh.” That phrase captures the central tension: the rabbit’s cautious body is at odds with a desire for something braver. He leaps upward with “one long circle of despairing grace,” a beautiful but impossible gesture, and instead of reaching his imagined pasture he crashes against a snake, which eats him “with a meditative interest.” The collision is brutal, but the snake’s calm deliberation makes it stranger and more unsettling than simple predation.
After the meal, the poem turns inward. The snake becomes filled with “little, meek whispers of concern.” The rabbit’s “crushed and peaceful” dream casts “a groping hush” upon the snake’s blood. The predator is not unchanged; it has swallowed not only flesh but a way of seeing, a hesitant sensitivity that now unsettles it. Curled inertly on a rock, the snake grows “cryptic, wilted savageness,” losing its sharp vitality. By the final image, its dry grey body is scattered on the rock “like a story that could not be told.” The fable ends not with a clear lesson but with an image of meaning dissolving, a body reduced to fragments that cannot form a coherent tale.
The construction of the poem supports this movement from lyrical longing to muted despair. Bodenheim writes in free verse, with no regular rhyme scheme, but he uses long vowels and soft consonants to create a sense of suspension. In the opening, the repeated o and w sounds of “Rounded,” “clownishness,” “Crowned,” and “brown” give the rabbit a kind of gentle, bobbing music. The phrase “despairing grace” is deliberately oxymoronic, joining failure and elegance in a single leap. The snake’s “meditative interest” is chillingly calm, while the later whisper-like alliteration of “little, meek whispers of concern” makes the snake’s internal change feel fragile and involuntary. Words such as “phantom,” “furtiveness,” “groping,” and “cryptic” keep the poem hovering between dream and threat, never allowing the rabbit’s heaven or the snake’s violence to settle into a single tone.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to offer a simple moral. Fables usually teach something: the clever survive, the proud fall, the weak are warned. Here, the innocent is eaten, and the eater is haunted. The rabbit’s vision does not lead to escape; instead it enters the snake as an unspoken, disturbing presence. The final line suggests that some experiences—especially those of the powerless or the silenced—become stories that cannot be fully told, yet still leave their mark. In this way, “Rattlesnake Mountain Fable I” turns the fable form against itself, using its clear animal shapes to ask difficult questions about hunger, aspiration, and the limits of storytelling. The poem remains as eerie and unresolved as the dry grey body on the rock.