Olson's "Snake" begins with praise and then drags that praise somewhere unpleasant. "Bright ringed and beautiful / coral" suggests a coral snake, banded and vivid. By the third line it is "dry" and linked to a "death rattle in a pig/sty," and by the fourth it is "in the belly of a pig, / dead." The poem never says clearly whether the snake or the pig is dead, and that uncertainty is part of its method. What it does insist on, with a stubborn "Yet," is that the snake is still beautiful: "Yet / you are beautiful." The central idea seems to be that beauty and death are not opposites here. The poem finds a kind of grace inside the ugliest setting it can imagine, and it ends by wondering at the power that makes this possible.
Notice the shift in address. The opening describes the snake in the third person, but after "Yet" the poet speaks straight to it: "you are beautiful." The tone becomes intimate, almost tender, as if the speaker were defending the snake against what the first lines have done to it.
The most striking image comes next: "turn of the wrist / whole arm in the belly of a pig." A human figure appears, reaching into the animal. The poem doesn't explain why, and the scene could be read as farm work or as something closer to ritual. What matters is the echo. A "turn of the wrist" mirrors the "ringed" coil of the snake, and the word "turn" comes back two lines later when the snake "turns / winter to spring." The gesture of the hand and the movement of the snake become one motion, and that motion is the poem's engine, turning something dead into something alive.
That is why the line "And snake does walk out" matters so much. Snakes have no legs, so "walk" is impossible, and the plain, emphatic "does" sounds like an answer to someone who doubted it. Leaving out the article, so it is "snake" and not "the snake," makes it feel less like an animal than a figure from myth. The seasonal change, "winter to spring," gives the poem its rebirth. Yet the pig's eye stays "fixed upon nothing." The poem doesn't cancel the death. It sets renewal beside it.
The form does a lot of quiet work. There is no regular rhythm and no rhyme scheme, though fourteen lines is the length of a sonnet, and the line breaks feel like deliberate cuts. The slash in "pig/sty" splits the word as if with a blade, and the apostrophe in "pig's eye" is likewise replaced by a slash, so that "pig/s" ends one line and "eye" stares out alone at the start of the next. The spaced periods in "coral . dry" and "beautiful . ringed" act as small, hard pauses in the middle of lines, and they stop the reader's breath at the moment of looking.
The sound is carefully patterned even without rhyme. A long *i* runs through "Bright," "dry," "sty" and "eye," with "dry" and "sty" almost rhyming across adjacent lines, and the hard consonants of "death rattle" clatter in the mouth. "Death rattle" is also the name for the sound of a dying breath, so the phrase carries a human death into the animal scene. (A true coral snake has no rattle, which suggests the poem cares more about sound and symbol than about zoology.)
The last two lines leave the reader off balance: "The power that snake has / that pig should love him." The grammar is knotted. It might mean a power so great that the pig loves the snake, or that the pig ought to love him. Either way, the pig, dead or dying, is the one who loves. That could be tenderness, or it could be surrender to something stronger. The poem declines to say.
This ambiguity is what makes "Snake" worth reading. In very few words it joins the farmyard to myth, the surgeon's or farmhand's gesture to the movement of a serpent, and the cold of death to the warmth of spring. It will not tell us whether the snake is savior or predator, and it leaves us admiring something we might rather flinch from.