Squirrels
The wild animal everyone overlooks, alert and hoarding, three feet from your window.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about squirrels: quick imagery, hoarding and memory, craft techniques, honest mistakes, exercises and prompts by Writory for poets.
What this theme is
The squirrel is the wild animal most of us actually see, and that familiarity is the theme's trap and its treasure. Because squirrels are everywhere, it is easy to write them as garden furniture. But watch one properly and the poem changes: the frozen alertness, the tail speaking a language of flicks, the sudden vertical sprint that treats gravity as a rumour. A squirrel poem succeeds when it restores wildness to a creature the reader stopped noticing years ago.
Squirrels also carry one of the most human of behaviours: they hoard. An animal that buries food against a winter it cannot be sure of reaching is already a poem about anxiety, providence and forgetting, since many caches are never found again. The forgotten acorn that becomes an oak is almost too perfect a metaphor; the craft lies in earning it freshly rather than reaching for it first.
Why poets return to it
Poets choose squirrels when they want nature poetry without a hike: this is wilderness at the bird feeder, ideal for writing about the wild edges of ordinary life. The theme suits poems about vigilance, thrift, restlessness and the strange economies of memory, everything we store and cannot find again.
It is also a superb exercise in observation, the muscle under all imagery. If you can make a reader see a squirrel, an animal they saw yesterday, as if for the first time, you can make them see anything.
Where it comes from
Squirrels scamper through English nature poetry mostly at the margins, which is part of their charm. John Clare, the great field-level observer, noted them among the particulars of his Northamptonshire woods, valuing them exactly as they were rather than as symbols. W. B. Yeats caught the theme's essential comedy and sadness in To a Squirrel at Kyle-na-no, published in 1919, where the poet invites the animal to play and admits it will run away, since all he wants is to touch its head, and it cannot know that.
The nursery tradition claimed the squirrel early, in rhymes of whisking tails and hoarded nuts, and children's verse has never let go. Contemporary urban nature poets have taken the theme up again, finding in the park squirrel a survivor negotiating the same city we do.
The elements that carry it
- The tail: flag, parasol, blanket and rudder, an expressive instrument that can carry a whole poem's body language.
- Caching and forgetting, buried hoards as images of savings, secrets, memories and plans that outlive their maker.
- Vertical movement, trunks descended head-first, wires crossed, rooflines travelled, a map of the world drawn above ours.
- The freeze-and-burst rhythm of squirrel attention, stillness snapped by sprint, which a poem's pacing can borrow.
- Autumn abundance, acorns, beech mast, stripped cones on a stump, the season's plenty measured against coming scarcity.
Techniques that work
- Match your rhythm to squirrel movement: a long held line of stillness, then a scatter of short stressed beats for the dash.
- Write the hoard, not just the animal. A list poem of everything buried, real and figurative, can turn inventory into elegy.
- Use the head-first descent or the impossible leap as your volta, letting the poem turn where the animal turns.
- Observe one specific squirrel for ten minutes before drafting, and let two details you could not have invented anchor the poem.
- Set human storage against squirrel caching, pensions, lofts, unsent letters, and let the comparison stay implicit.
Mistakes to avoid
- Cute by default. Nutkin and cartoon chatter erase the animal; the real one is nervy, fierce and occasionally a thief.
- Leading with the forgotten-acorn-becomes-oak moral. It is a fine truth ruined by arriving too early and too neatly.
- Generic verbs: scamper and frolic do less work than one exact image of a squirrel pouring itself down a trunk.
- Ignoring the fear. A squirrel's life is mostly vigilance; a poem with no hawk-shadow in it is only half true.
An exercise
Watch a squirrel, live or from memory, and write down everything it does in two minutes, in plain prose, timestamped. Then cut the prose to twelve lines, keeping only movements and objects, and see what feeling the sequence makes on its own.
A challenge
Write a poem cataloguing everything a squirrel buried in one garden over one autumn, letting at least three items in the list be things no squirrel would bury.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about a squirrel returning to search for a cache it cannot find, in the exact spot where the speaker also lost something.
Before you submit
- At least two details come from real observation rather than cartoon memory.
- The poem's rhythm changes at least once to match the animal's movement.
- Any moral about hoarding or forgetting arrives late and lightly, if at all.
- The squirrel has fear or hunger in it somewhere, not only charm.
- The final line leaves an image in the reader's eye, not a lesson in their ear.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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