An Appointment - Analysis

A bitter errand turns into an accidental lesson

The poem begins in a mood of political fatigue: the speaker is out of heart with government and goes out not to vote or argue but to perform a small, half-helpless gesture—he took a broken root to fling. That impulse feels like displaced anger: the government is too large to strike, so the speaker aims at something smaller, quick, and available. Yet the poem’s central claim sharpens as the scene unfolds: what the speaker encounters in the squirrel is a kind of vitality and freedom that politics cannot produce, imitate, or legitimately control.

The squirrel as a picture of unappointed joy

The squirrel is described in terms that make him both wild and triumphant. He is proud and wayward, taking delight in his own springing. Even his sound—that low whinnying sound—is like laughter, as if the animal is not merely escaping the thrown root but answering human frustration with a laugh that isn’t cruel so much as untouchable. The speaker tracks the squirrel’s movement precisely—to the other tree, at a bound—and the attention itself starts to feel like a change of heart: irritation gives way to fascinated respect.

What the human world breeds: tameness, timidity, and heaviness

The poem’s most pointed contrast arrives in the triple negation: Nor the tame will, nor timid brain, Nor heavy knitting. Yeats makes the human qualities sound bodily and dulled—will that has been domesticated, intelligence that has become fear, a brow permanently tightened into managerial worry. Against this, the squirrel’s body is described as fierce tooth and cleanly limb, a clean efficiency the speaker implies is not available to a mind trained into caution. The tension here is uncomfortable: the poem admires the animal’s freedom, but it also uses that freedom to accuse people (and perhaps the speaker himself) of consenting to their own smallness.

The real target isn’t the squirrel—it’s the idea of appointment

The final line—No govermnent appointed him—lands like a verdict. The misspelling doesn’t weaken the point; it almost heightens the sense of impatience, as if the speaker can’t even be bothered to treat the institution with formal correctness. Appointment here means more than a job or a post. It suggests the whole notion that legitimate life must be authorized: that energy, place, and even joy are granted from above. The squirrel becomes a rebuke to that fantasy. He needs no permission to be fully himself, and the speaker’s earlier urge to fling the root begins to look like a symptom of living in a world where permission has replaced instinct.

A hard question the poem leaves hanging

If the squirrel’s laughter is irresistible, it is also isolating: it belongs to a creature outside civic life altogether. So what is the speaker meant to do with the lesson? The poem risks a bleak implication—that the only unspoiled freedom is nonhuman, and that once a person lives under government, the best they can do is watch a wild thing leap and feel the ache of what they’ve lost.

From political despair to a grudging praise of the wild

The tonal turn is subtle but real: the poem moves from deflation (out of heart) to a kind of sharpened admiration, even envy, as the squirrel repeatedly sprang again. Yet the ending refuses comfort. Instead of concluding that nature heals, Yeats concludes that nature exposes: it shows how much of human life is shaped by timidness, heaviness, and the need to be appointed. The squirrel’s clean leap becomes, in the speaker’s eyes, an indictment of a society—and a self—that has forgotten how to move without asking.