'A narrow Fellow in the Grass' published in the Springfield Daily Republican

On February 14, 1866, Dickinson's poem 'A narrow Fellow in the Grass' was published in the Springfield Daily Republican, one of the last of her poems to be printed during her lifetime.

This poem, a vivid and unsettling depiction of an encounter with a snake in a field, is celebrated for its precise, sensory imagery and its exploration of instinctive fear and the uncanny in nature—the speaker describes feeling a 'tighter breathing' and 'Zero at the Bone' upon meeting the creature.

Dickinson was reportedly displeased by this publication, having not authorized it herself; her letters suggest she felt her poem had been sent to print without her consent, an episode that reinforced her wariness of the public literary marketplace and her editors' tendency to alter her distinctive punctuation and lineation without permission.

This publication came several years after the flurry of poems that appeared in early 1862, reflecting the sporadic and largely uncontrolled nature of her lifetime publication history—she published fewer than a dozen poems total across more than three decades of prolific private composition.

The poem remains one of her most anthologized works today, admired for its psychological acuity and technical mastery, and it stands as one of the final documented instances of her poetry reaching a public audience before her death two decades later.