Waking to find a snake coiled on your head should be terrifying, yet the speaker's first move is to make small talk: "What are you doing up there?" The poem is built on that comic mismatch, an alarming situation met with the manners of a squabble in the playground. The snake answers by turning the question around ("What are you doing down there?"), and the speaker, instead of explaining, snaps back, "I asked you first!" From there things go downhill, literally. The snake covers the speaker's eyes, the speaker tumbles headfirst out of bed, and the morning ends in pain. Then the poem starts over, almost word for word.
Its central idea seems to be that stubbornness gets you nowhere, and nobody learns from it. Neither character will answer a plain question. The snake's counter-question is fair enough, since the speaker really is "down there", but the speaker treats the exchange as a contest to be won on technicalities. The snake's reaction is revealing: it is "unhappy with my reply", as petty and easily offended as a child. The poem never says whether this is a dream, a nightmare, or just a bad start to the day. What matters is the pattern: a pointless standoff, a punishment, and no lesson at the end.
The structure drives the point home. The poem opens and closes with the same event, "when I awoke one morning, / a snake was coiled on my head", so the story is a loop rather than a line. Even the connecting words, "And so", promise a consequence that never arrives, because the ending simply returns to the beginning. As printed, the first version runs "snakecoiled" together, probably a slip, but the closing version repairs it to "a snake was coiled", which is oddly fitting. The same scene comes back slightly corrected, and the speaker still hasn't changed.
The sound and rhythm do some quiet work too. The opening lines are short and bouncy, five or so words each, like the start of a nursery tale. As the quarrel heats up, the lines swell: "The snake slithered down, unhappy with my reply, and covered my eyes" sprawls across the line, and you can almost feel it sliding. Line 8 is nearly as long, then the poem shrinks back to short lines as it returns to the beginning. Rhyme appears only in the even-numbered lines, and the pairs are *head* and *said*, *first* and *worst*, *bed* and *head*. The odd lines are left unrhymed, which gives the poem a slightly lopsided, ballad-like bounce. "First" and "worst" suit the speaker's voice especially well. The rhyme is blunt and childish, and "it was the worst" is a flat, schoolyard way to describe an injury.
The imagery centres on one word, head. A snake sits on the head, the speaker falls "headfirst", and the head then feels "angry, bathed in agony". The last phrase is the poem's one burst of grand language, and its exaggeration is funny, since "bathed" suggests something soothing and the "agony" is just a bump from a fall. The head becomes the poem's real victim, and perhaps the real culprit, since it started the quarrel. The snake's act of covering the speaker's eyes is the poem's most suggestive image. Judging by the sequence, the speaker is blinded just before the fall, as if refusing to answer has left them unable to see where they are going. That is an inference rather than a statement, but the order of events invites it.
Vertical movement matters as well. The snake begins "up there" and the speaker "down there", but the quarrel moves everything downward. The snake slithers down, the speaker falls out of bed, and the two never meet on equal terms.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into twelve lines. It is funny on the surface, and its repeated question and circular shape turn a silly dream-conversation into a small picture of how arguments go wrong. Two sides each insist the other speak first, and the morning begins again exactly as it did before.