Maxwell Bodenheim’s “Rattlesnake Mountain Fable II” comes from a poet whose name once glowed in the Chicago literary renaissance before fading into bohemian legend. Born in 1892, Bodenheim moved through the same early modernist circles as Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters, publishing spare, musical free verse in the 1910s and 1920s. His “fable” belongs to that post–World War I moment when American poets were discarding strict meter and sentimental nature worship for sharper, more ironic forms. That context matters because a poem about a squirrel can feel at once whimsical and quietly devastating.
The narrative is deceptively simple. As August saunters down a mountain-side, dropping “mottled, turbid wraiths of decay,” a squirrel ignores the season’s rot and fixes its hungry eyes on the stars, mistaking them for “icily clustered nuts / Dotting trees of solitude.” The stars seem close enough to reach, yet the “fairy nut-trees” keep receding. Only when the squirrel looks down into a mountain pool does it find a handful of those same lights within reach. With a “squeal of weary happiness,” it plunges in and drowns, while the reflected stars jig over its body “like the unheard stirring of a poem.” The central idea is not merely that greed kills; it is that desire can mistake reflection for reality, and that the pursuit of an ideal—especially a beautiful one—can become its own undoing.
Bodenheim constructs the piece as free verse, without regular rhyme or meter, but it is held together by strong rhythmic phrases and recurring images of falling, looking, and dissolving. The opening personification of August “sauntering” and the air as “an old priest / Disrobing without embarrassment” establishes a strange moral weight: night is the “dark and candid gaze” before which the world undresses. That blend of the natural and the sacred makes the squirrel’s hunger feel small but not silly. The stars become nuts, then “fairy nut-trees,” then a reflection “Bit[ing] into the indigo cupping them”—a phrase that makes water seem to hold light in a bowl and swallow it at the same time. Sounds carry the fable too: the hissing alliteration of “saucily determined squirrel” and the hush of “soundless heart” give the poem a compressed, almost breath-held motion.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to moralize. Bodenheim does not punish the squirrel for folly or reward it for aspiration. Instead, he turns the death into a strange kind of aesthetic completion. The stars that could not be reached in the sky are reached, briefly, as a mirrored image; the price is the squirrel’s life. That final simile—“like the unheard stirring of a poem”—suggests that the fable itself is a reflection: art offers a glimpse of beauty, but only at a remove from the living world. The “unheard” poem is both silent and moving, just as the reflected stars keep jigging over the drowned creature. A small mountain fable becomes a compact meditation on illusion, art, and the cost of chasing what glitters just beyond one’s grasp.