Hoffenstein’s speaker adopts a mock-despairing tone to call the squirrel the greatest fool in creation. The animal digs what is essentially a grave, a worm-filled “catacomb,” and treats it as safety, cowering there from birds, beasts, people, and the open world. When it finally ventures out, the entire goal is just another nut. The exaggeration is deliberate and comic: the squirrel becomes a miniature portrait of timidity, pointless routine, and small ambitions. The mood is wry and misanthropic rather than genuinely angry—an amused sigh at a creature whose whole existence seems to be hiding and hoarding. Beneath the joke, there is a darker hint that people may not be so different, hiding from life and chasing trivial goals.
Songs of Fairly Utter Despair VI — Summary
Of all the idiots that abound Above, beneath, and on the ground. The blinking squirrel is to me The deepest-sunk in idiocy —
He builds himself a catacomb Among the worms, and calls it home, And there he cowers, sore afraid Of bird and beast and man and maid, And when, at last, he leaves his rut, His goal is just another nut.