Hans Ostrom’s “Squirrels” begins with an admission of lifelong watching, and that patient attention sets the tone: calm, fond, and alert to small gestures. The squirrels here live in “a zone just outside domesticity” and are “diplomatically wild.” The phrase is quietly paradoxical. They are not pets and not deep-forest creatures; they cross the border between the human and the wild, eating from yards but never joining the household. That in-betweenness is the poem’s real subject. Ostrom is less interested in squirrels as noble symbols than in the kind of unheroic wildness that is available right at the edge of human life.
The poem’s movement mimics its subject. Free verse and irregular line breaks allow moments of pause and sudden energy. When the speaker says, “Sometimes / they just stop. And fall asleep, mid-day, / on a limb or a fence post,” the line drops into stillness exactly where the squirrel does. The break after “Sometimes” isolates an ordinary word and turns it into a held breath. A little later, “Sometimes frenzy / possesses them” places the verb on the next line, so the frenzy feels as if it arrives out of nowhere. The syntax keeps shifting between clipped observations—“They worry and stare”—and longer, tumbling sentences that race toward the next action. There is no regular rhyme scheme; instead, the poem’s music comes from that stop-start rhythm, the repetition of “Sometimes,” and the slight roughness of words like “frenzy,” “gorge,” and “daintily.”
Ostrom’s diction mixes human and animal qualities with deliberate comedy. Squirrels “horde / forgetfully, gorge daintily.” Hoarding should be careful, but theirs is slipshod; gorging should be greedy, but theirs is refined. The speaker says he approves of the way they “worry and stare,” which turns anxiety into a shared trait rather than a human failing. The poem does not hide the causes of their “mad bursts of wants”: sex or fleas. Naming those plain bodily drives keeps the squirrels from becoming sentimental. The most memorable image is the “nut-grave,” where the squirrel buries an acorn, pats “fresh / soil” over it, and then bolts. The metaphor is funny and slightly eerie; it treats forgetting as part of the creature’s charm.
The central turn arrives when the speaker admits, “Squirrels / are not everything I had hoped wilderness / to be.” That sounds like a letdown, but the next lines correct it: “They are though everything / I would want squirrels to be, and / slightly more.” The awkward placement of “though” keeps the speech natural and unpolished. The speaker gives up a grander image of wilderness—remote, dramatic, sublime—and accepts an ordinary, fidgeting, forgetful version instead. What makes the poem significant is that it finds enough wonder in that smaller wildness. Squirrels are not a disappointment; they are “slightly more” because evolution keeps producing surprises, “one more surprise ready to leap / out of squirrel-evolution.” The final exclamation, “And run away!”, is the poem’s own last squirrel-like move: after all the close watching, it refuses to stand still for a moral. The wildness Ostrom values is not sublime isolation but continuous, restless negotiation with the world at the edge of home.