[Jayne Osborn]

I like the poem itself, though if this wasn't a sonnet bake-off I wouldn't have recognised the form, as others have said.

I suspect that I might be the only Spherian to have a pet snake, so I love the notion of anyone happily letting a harmless snake slide across their hand - a thought that others abhor.

Again, as someone else remarked (I can't remember who, sorry,) my feeling is that if this had been posted on Metrical there would have been more suggestions for improvement than straightforward praise for it.

An interesting start to the bake-off, though I won't be voting for this one, and that's without having seen any of the others yet, simply because I'm a traditionalist and prefer more rigid adherence to the form.

Jayne

[Mary McLean]

I'm not sure I'd call this IP, but I'd certainly call it a sonnet. Are the two indivisible? The frequent anapestic feet suit the chaotic rhythm of childhood, though as others have suggested it might be nice for the final couplet to revert to a more rigid pattern for contrast.

I can't decide whether I like the symbolism, which feels a bit tacked-on. Is the snake the devil or male genitalia or just a reptile? I'm not sure a snake really can be just a snake in a poem nowadays, particularly in a poem about childhood. The wealth of physical detail and the breathless exuberance of the tone are very attractive, but the clues to the poem's subtext are so contradictory that it doesn't end up meaning much to me. My preference would be for a bit more clarity in the final couplet on the narrator's current state, as others have suggested, since it obviously isn't narrated by a child. But maybe that would mess up the tone.