Four lines into "Who's Afraid?", a child has already decided what kind of speaker he is. He is gentle, he has permission from his Daddy, and he means no harm. By the final line he has discovered something he did not plan to learn: the person doing the most worrying in this encounter is not the squirrel.
The poem is a small comic drama in three stanzas, and each stanza shifts the balance of power. In the first, the child is the confident one. He addresses the squirrel with the grand, slightly theatrical "O little squirrel in the tree," and he opens with a question that quietly puts the animal on trial: "Why are you looking down at me?" He assumes the squirrel's gaze is a problem to be explained. His reassurance is borrowed, too. "My Daddy says that you have charm" is a good example of a child using an adult's authority as armor. He doesn't say the squirrel is charming; he reports that someone more reliable has said so. The promise of "I wouldn't do you any harm" is sincere, but it is also the kind of thing people say when they want to be believed.
The second stanza is the bargain. The child offers "this big nut," and the word "big" matters: it is a child's idea of a generous price, and a small boast about the quality of his gift. When the squirrel obeys, the speaker is triumphant: "And now you're climbing down the tree, / I see you're not afraid of me." Notice the logic. The squirrel's descent is taken as proof of the speaker's trustworthiness, and the pleasure in those lines is almost entirely self-congratulation. The child has been tested and, he thinks, passed.
Then the third stanza turns on a single word: "But." "But you are coming pretty near, / And I am getting full of fear." The phrase "pretty near" is wonderfully ordinary, the vague, conversational measure of distance a child would use, and it shows how quickly proximity changes everything. The speaker's earlier language of charm and harm evaporates, replaced by plain panic. His two-part question, "shall I run, or shall I stay?", is the poem's most honest moment, and the dash that follows it holds the pause where the decision hangs. Then the squirrel settles the matter for him by shying away. The title's question is answered in a way the child never anticipated: the creature he was trying to calm was only ever as brave as he was.
Formally, the poem is built as neatly as its tiny plot. It runs in rhyming couplets (tree/me, charm/harm, meet/eat, tree/me again, near/fear, stay/away), and the rhythm is a light, bouncing line of four beats that suits a nursery-rhyme voice. The couplets give the poem a sing-song confidence, which makes the intrusion of fear in stanza three more comic by contrast. It is also telling that "tree" and "me" return as a rhyme pair in the second stanza, as though the poem circles back to its starting point with the roles quietly reversed: first the child is looking up at the squirrel, then the squirrel is climbing down toward him. The final line breaks the pattern of steady reassurance with exclamatory punctuation, "But now—from me you shy away!—", ending on a dash rather than a full stop, so the poem seems to stop mid-motion, just as the squirrel does.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much psychology it fits into twelve lines. It captures a very recognizable human habit: we announce our harmlessness loudly, and we are most surprised when someone takes us at our word. The humor is gentle and the child is never mocked. His fear is as real as his kindness, and the poem lets both be true at once, which is why the ending feels less like a punchline than like an affectionate shrug.