From its first line, Yeats’s “An Appointment” sets a private grievance against an animal’s careless vitality. The speaker is “out of heart with government” — not merely opposed to a policy but emptied of feeling by the whole machinery of rule. In that mood he picks up a “broken root” and flings it after a squirrel. What follows is not punishment but revelation. The squirrel gives a “low whinnying sound / That is like laughter” and leaps to another tree; the poem closes by insisting that “No government appointed him.” The central idea is that the fiercest, most alive things cannot be created or controlled by political order. They are born, not appointed.
The poem’s shape enacts its argument. Its eleven lines are mostly four-beat, but the rhythm is springy rather than stiff, quickened by phrases such as “to the other tree at a bound.” Rhyme arrives in loose, almost accidental pairs: “fling” with “spring,” “sound” with “bound,” “limb” with “him.” The opening word “government” finds only a slant echo in “went,” and “bough” hangs unpaired, as if the poem itself declines to be tidily managed. That formal looseness matters: a poem about ungovernable vitality should not sound too governed.
The imagery works through contrast. The speaker throws a “broken root,” a dead fragment of nature, while the squirrel is all “fierce tooth and cleanly limb.” The word “fierce” suggests appetite and combat; “cleanly” suggests precision, nothing wasted. The squirrel is “proud” and “wayward,” two qualities of aristocratic disobedience. It does not wait for permission. In the phrase “Taking delight that he could spring,” the grammar hovers: either the speaker takes delight in the squirrel’s movement, or the squirrel takes delight in its own power. That ambiguity is the poem’s turn. The man’s irritation begins to shade into admiration.
Sound is central too. The squirrel’s “low whinnying sound / That is like laughter” is not human speech, but it carries mockery and joy. The word “whinnying,” more often attached to horses, makes the laughter bodily and strange. Laughter returns in “laugh on the bough,” so the creature seems to mock from a height, above the speaker’s government and his broken root.
The final reflection is deliberately unromantic. “Nor the tame will, nor timid brain, / Bred that fierce tooth and cleanly limb.” The words “tame” and “timid” belong to the human world of caution and rule; the verb “bred” belongs to nature. An appointment is an official act — a post, a committee, a position granted by authority. The last line cancels all those meanings: no government appointed the squirrel. It does not need an office to have authority.
That is what makes the poem significant. It turns a tiny, almost comic encounter into a political fable. It does not say that freedom is easy or that the speaker is changed; it simply places the man’s disenchantment next to an image of ungovernable life. The pleasure of the squirrel’s leap is not produced by institutions, and no government can claim it. The poem therefore reads as a quiet refusal of the idea that human power is the source of value.