Anyone who has fed a squirrel in a park will recognize the small drama at the heart of "He Didn't Say Thank You": you offer something, the animal takes it, and then it simply leaves. The speaker, a child, treats this as a lapse in manners. She did everything properly, and the squirrel repaid her with a vanishing act. What makes the poem charming is that its whole argument is built on the logic of a child's sense of fairness, in which kindness ought to be answered by kindness, and good behavior ought to be noticed.
Look at how carefully the first stanza establishes the speaker's good conduct. The peanuts came from her uncle, and she holds them "in my fingertips / The way my auntie taught me." She is following instructions, passing along an etiquette she has learned from the adults around her. This detail does quiet work. By the end, the child's indignation is really a lesson she has absorbed turned back on the world: she was taught how to give, and presumably also taught to say thank you, so the squirrel's silence feels like a breach of rules everyone is supposed to share.
The second stanza is the funniest, and the most revealing. "The gray squirrel sat and nibbled the nuts / As the squirrels in the park all do." The line sounds like a naturalist's note, a calm statement of how squirrels behave, and it quietly undermines the speaker's complaint. If this is simply what squirrels do, then this one has done nothing wrong. Yet the child barrels on with a wish that is wonderfully illogical: "I sometimes wish that the little gray squirrel / Would feed me peanuts, too." Her sense of justice demands a reversal, with the squirrel playing host. The word "sometimes" is a nice touch, suggesting this is no sudden pique but a long-running feeling about how the world's exchanges ought to work.
The final stanza delivers the verdict. When the nuts are gone, "Away the little squirrel flew." Squirrels, of course, do not fly, and the verb is doing something deliberate. It captures how fast and complete the squirrel's exit seems from a child's eye level, a blur that leaves her standing there with empty fingertips. The phrase is also the poem's gentlest exaggeration, the kind a child would make while telling the story afterward. Then comes the direct question to the reader: "Do you think that was a very nice thing / For a little squirrel to do?" The poem ends by recruiting us as jury, and the question is so innocently framed that we are tempted to answer it, even though we know the squirrel was only being a squirrel.
The construction matches this plain-spoken tone. Each stanza has four lines, with the second and fourth rhyming ("do" / "too" / "do"; "me" / "me" in the opening stanza works with "taught me"), and the short, bouncing lines have the feel of a nursery rhyme or a spoken story. The rhythm is easy and loose rather than rigid, closer to how a child would actually talk than to formal verse. Notice also how often the poem repeats "little" and "gray," the way a young speaker lingers over simple descriptive words. The vocabulary stays small and concrete throughout: peanuts, fingertips, park, nuts. Nothing in it reaches beyond what a child might say.
The poem's significance lies in this combination of lightness and insight. On the surface it is a comic complaint, but underneath it touches something universal: the discovery that generosity is not always returned, and that the world does not run on the neat rules of politeness we are taught. The child hasn't learned that yet, and the poem lets us enjoy her innocence without mocking it. Her question, left hanging at the end, is one adults ask in subtler forms all their lives. In that sense the squirrel is more than an animal in a park. It stands for everyone who takes what is offered and moves on, and for the small, honest disappointment of the person left behind.