Sharon Van Etten / Tramp / 2011
Serpents
guarded, weary, quietly accusatory
"Serpents" is a slow-burning indictment of a manipulative partner, built from fragmented images of surveillance, control, and psychological damage. Van Etten's narrator circles the relationship's cruelty without ever fully narrating it, letting repetition and tone carry the accusation. The song is less a story than a mood of wary, exhausted vigilance.
emotional abuse surveillance and suspicion self-protection stalled growth vs. change complicity and forgiveness
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses an unnamed partner directly, oscillating between confession and accusation; she reads as reliable but emotionally exhausted, someone parsing a relationship from inside its fog rather than after clean escape.
What happens
The song opens in a scene of secrecy and hidden danger, then moves inward to the narrator's psychological state, where paranoia (the serpents) becomes a recurring motif tied to unspoken wrongdoing on the partner's part. Midway through, she asserts a small act of self-preservation, choosing to seek comfort elsewhere after the partner fails to take her seriously. By the end she circles back to the same central image, now attempting something like forgiveness, though the plea for change reads more like hope than certainty.
How it's built
The song relies on a recurring chorus-like refrain that mutates slightly each time it returns, tracking an emotional arc from searching to condemning to attempting forgiveness. Verses are short, elliptical, and image-based rather than linear, which mirrors the narrator's difficulty pinning down exactly what's wrong; the refrain functions as the song's stable center while the verses drift around it.
Section by section
Opening verse
“sitting in the back of the room”
The scene is deliberately vague and secretive, establishing an atmosphere of hidden activity and quiet danger before any relationship is named.
Second verse
“close in on my black eye”
A stark, possibly literal image of violence surfaces briefly, then is immediately reframed as a strange kind of safety, suggesting a normalized or confusing relationship to harm.
First refrain
The serpent metaphor is introduced here as the song's emotional anchor, framing the partner's unnamed wrongdoing as something the narrator is actively hunting for evidence of, not simply enduring.
Middle verse
The narrator describes a small act of self-assertion, seeking intimacy elsewhere after feeling dismissed, which reads as both retaliation and a quiet admission of loneliness.
Second refrain
“you'll stay frozen in time”
The idea of change becomes a dividing line between the two people—she changes, he doesn't—turning the refrain into a diagnosis of the relationship's imbalance.
Final verse and refrain
An image of surface-level control over others' perceptions deepens the character sketch of the partner as image-conscious, and the closing attempt at forgiveness feels tentative, undercut by the conditional hope rather than confidence that he will actually change.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- The serpent image recurs throughout as a stand-in for suspicion and hidden malice, letting the narrator name a feeling without ever specifying the literal offense.
- repetition with variation
- The refrain returns three times with small but telling changes—from searching, to naming crimes, to forgiving—tracking emotional movement while keeping the song's structure circular rather than resolved.
- imagery of surfaces and mirrors
- References to appearance and reflection suggest a partner who curates how others see him, contrasting with the private cruelty the narrator experiences.
- ellipsis
- The lyric withholds concrete narrative detail, forcing the listener to infer the nature of the relationship's harm from tone and fragment rather than plot.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a portrait of a controlling or possibly abusive relationship, where the narrator's paranoia (the serpents) is less irrational fear than accumulated evidence she can't fully articulate or prove. An alternative reading takes the imagery more abstractly, as a meditation on the difficulty of trusting one's own perception inside any close relationship, where the 'crimes' are ambiguous rather than literal. The song doesn't resolve which is true, and that ambiguity is arguably the point—the narrator herself seems unsure whether she's uncovering wrongdoing or projecting it.
Context
"Serpents" appears on Van Etten's 2011 album Tramp, produced by Aaron Dessner of The National, a record often noted for its darker, more full-band sound compared to her earlier stripped-down work. I don't have reliable biographical detail linking this specific song to a named event or relationship in Van Etten's life, so any narrative specifics should be treated as inferred from the text rather than confirmed history.
Listen for
- how the vocal delivery tightens on the refrain each time it returns
- the shift in tone between the quiet verses and the more insistent chorus melody
- the way the black-eye image passes by quickly without dwelling, forcing the listener to catch it
- the subtle change in the refrain's final line from searching to forgiving
About Sharon Van Etten
Sharon Katharine Van Etten is an American singer-songwriter, musician and actress. Originally from New Jersey, and currently based in Los Angeles, Van Etten's music is noted for its indie rock aesthetic and personal lyrical content.
b. 1981 / United States
Full biography and catalogue