Sixteen words, four questions, and not one answer: Hazel McKay's "What...?" is a tiny poem about being trapped inside your own head. The poem never tells us what happened. Judging by the questions, though, something has gone wrong between the speaker and someone else, perhaps a silence or a rejection. All we get is the aftermath, the anxious replaying of events and the hunt for a mistake. The speaker never accuses anyone. Every question points back at the self.
The title sets this up. "What...?" is a fragment, and the ellipsis followed by a question mark makes it sound half-bewildered, half-stunned, like someone who has just been told something and hasn't yet found the rest of the sentence. The four lines that follow are that sentence trying to finish itself.
The structure is neat and tightly controlled. Each line is just four syllables, and each carries about two strong beats: WHAT did I DO? The rhyme scheme alternates, with "do" answering "blue" and "say" answering "gay". That bounce is almost nursery-rhyme-like, and the effect is unsettling. A jingly rhythm usually suggests lightness, yet here it carries panic, so the form seems to loop and spin the way an anxious mind does at night. The repetition helps. "What did I" opens the first two lines, and "Was I too" opens the last two, so the poem feels like a mantra the speaker cannot stop reciting.
There is a quiet shift between the two halves. The first couplet asks open "What" questions about actions: what did I do, what did I say? These are about behaviour, things that could be pinned down and perhaps fixed. The second couplet narrows to "Was I too…?", and the questions are now about temperament and mood. The speaker has moved from "did I make a mistake?" to "am I the mistake?" That is a darker place to arrive, and it happens in only two lines.
The word "too" is the hinge of the poem. It appears twice and implies a standard set by somebody else, a measure of how much is acceptable. The adjectives it modifies are opposites: "blue" for sad, "gay" for cheerful. The speaker wonders whether they were too gloomy or too bright, and the pairing leaves almost no safe middle ground. If both sorrow and joy can be "too much", then the problem may not be any particular thing the speaker did at all. The feeling that you are always slightly the wrong size for other people's patience is exactly what makes this doubt so painful.
Then comes the asterisk. The footnote "*happy" is the most unusual feature of the poem, because it drags the apparatus of a reference book into a moment of emotional distress. It also has a second effect. Readers today may hear a different meaning in "gay", and the gloss seems to guard against that reading, or at least to acknowledge it. That is an inference, since the poem itself does not explain the footnote. Still, it fits the poem's mood. Even a single word has to stop and justify itself in case it is misunderstood, which is exactly what the speaker fears about their own behaviour. The tiny, almost apologetic note under the poem echoes the speaker's anxiety in a way no extra stanza could.
The footnote also works practically. "Gay" is the rhyme for "say", and the gloss tells us the poet chose it for its sense of cheerfulness, setting it neatly against "blue". The two colours-of-mood sit side by side, defined and ready to be judged.
What makes the poem significant is its economy. It does not narrate a quarrel, name a person or offer comfort. It simply holds the question open and ends on a footnote, a small, flat, bureaucratic gesture that leaves the reader with the speaker's uncertainty rather than a resolution. Most of us have lain awake combing through a conversation for the line that did the damage. McKay compresses that experience into a few seconds of reading, and the lack of an answer is what makes it feel true.