David Herbert (DH) Lawrence’s “Snake” and its Value in African Indigenous Knowledge.

Abstract

This paper examines the snake as perceived by D.H. Lawrence in his poem “Snake” vis-à-vis its values in Yoruba socio-cultural milieu. It also examines the connotation of snake from the indigenous African Contexts of Camara Laye’s The African Child and Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God where the snake is a “guiding spirit” and symbol of a water god respectively. Pragmatics, semiotics and African epistemology are used as theories. The paper concludes that unlike Lawrence’s “Snake” with its aesthetics made manifest through the poet’s descriptions of the snake’s colours and poetic structural analyses, the poetics of snake in the indigenous African contexts form part of the people’s culture. In other words, it is their worldview and it is extra- somatic.