Line by line analysis
1. That is the way God made you.
2. And what is wrong with it? Why, Nothing. 3. Except that you are cold and cannot cook. 4. Merdice can cook. Merdice 5. Of Murdered heart and docked sarcastic soul. 6. Merdice 7. The bolted Nomad, on a winter noon 8. Cook guts; and sits in gas. (She has no shawl, her landlord has no coal.) 9. You out beyond the shellac of her look 10. And of her sill! 11. She envies you your fury 12. Buffoonery 13. That enfolds your silver skill 14. She thinks you are a mountain and a star, unbaffleable; 15. With sentient twitch and scurry. |
1 & 2. In lines one and two Merdice is speaking to the winter squirrel. As she exclaims "this is the way God made you" she implies that the squirrel should accept its current situation.
3 & 4. The squirrel is cold outside the and has to hunt for food to survive. Merdice has the luxury of cooking food which is why Merdice thinks the squirrel should envy her. 5 & 6. This line touches on Merdice's mentality. Merdice's heart is murdered due to the struggles of an urban black growing up in Chicago. She is docked where she is at , implying that she tied down in her current situation due to outside forces. think of a boat being docked at the harbor. 7. Bolted and nomad are not words you usually see paired together because the two contradict each other. You bolt something down to keep it in place and a nomad is always moving from place to place. The two together show how aggravated Merdice is, she wants to change her current situation but she cannot. 8. Merdice cannot afford to buy the better parts of the animal so she is forced to eat the guts. She has no shawl to keep her warm and no coal to warm her home. She is cold just as the squirrel is. 9 & 10. Merdice again looks out at the squirrel through her window. 11. Merdice is now watching the squirrel's movements and comments on how she envies how it moves furiously, going in any direction it pleases at any moment 12 & 13. She finds this amusing. 14 & 15. To a physically view a mountain or a star in nature you have to lift your head. Merdice now concludes that she looks up to the winter squirrel who has a great conscience sense impressions. Meaning that the squirrel can leave and move at the first sign of danger. |
Overview
To a Winter Squirrel is “both a sonnet of protest about the conditions under which many black Chicagoans lived, and a sonnet of seasonal complaint, in which a human being wishes she were more like animals, and n which winter seems to promise no spring”(Burt, Stephens/Mikcis, David). Brooks compares the life of Merdice to the life of the squirrel. The first three lines we see how the squirrel should envy Merdice for having a home and being able to cook but Merdice herself is cold; she has no shall or coal. Unable to leave from her current situation due to racial ideology that has lead her to her dull cold life, she becomes a bolted nomad in her cold apartment in windy southern Chicago. Lines four through fifteen we see how Merdice envies the squirrel. She envies it because unlike her it is not bolted to anything in life. It moves and does as it pleases; with no social boundaries to hinder its actions. Merdice wishes to have this freedom even though it is impossible to attain. This depressed her as she does not see time to change, she is in the winter of life and spring is not going to come.