Small Shoes Symbol in Goldenrod: Stars, Loss, and Witness

What Are Small Shoes in Goldenrod

The symbol of small shoes appears only once in Maggie Smith’s 2021 collection Goldenrod, in the poem titled “Small Shoes” (chapter 35). In that poem, the speaker imagines a boat filled with stars that has capsized. The stars wash up facedown on the sand, each wearing small shoes. The speaker then commands: “Add that to the report: / some of the stars washed up / in small shoes.” This surreal, childlike image fuses innocence (small shoes) with catastrophe (capsized boat, fallen stars). It functions as a concrete emblem for loss that is difficult to document—a loss that becomes real only when named and recorded.

Where the Symbol Reappears

The exact image of stars in small shoes does not recur elsewhere in the book. However, the motif of shoes and of small, precious objects appears in related forms:

In “Slipper” (chapter 20), the speaker’s daughter finds a common slipper shell, also called a boat shell. The shell is an empty home, once occupied by “something slick and muscular.” This shell echoes the small shoes of the stars: both are remnants, containers that once held life. The poem also plays with the idea of wearing one’s body as a home, linking shoes to identity.
In “Talisman” (chapter 53), the speaker carries pocket treasures—an acorn, a stone, a toy ear—that her son has given her. These small objects, like the small shoes, are charged with emotional protection and the desire to “believe almost anything.” They are talismans against loss.
In “Talk of Horses” (chapter 16), the speaker recalls tiny sample lipsticks from her childhood, “the size of my pinky tip.” These miniature objects function similarly to the small shoes: they are fragments of memory that stubbornly surface and demand interpretation.

Though “Small Shoes” is the only poem to directly pair stars and footwear, the collection repeatedly returns to small, vulnerable objects as carriers of meaning and witness.

How the Meaning Changes

Within the single poem “Small Shoes,” the symbol’s meaning shifts across its brief lines:

Initial uncertainty – The speaker begins by doubting whether the number of stars has actually decreased: “If there are fewer stars now / than when I was a child, / I can’t say / which are missing.” This opens an epistemological gap: the loss may be real, but the speaker cannot verify it.
Moral question – The poem then asks, “Is it not a crime / unless we call it a crime?” This shifts the focus from the loss itself to the act of naming. The stars’ disappearance becomes a crime only when someone declares it so. The speaker implicates herself (and readers) in the responsibility to label what is gone.
Surreal image as evidence – The capsized boat and stars in small shoes arrive as a vivid, almost fairy-tale-like corrective to the abstract discussion. The image is both absurd and heartbreaking. It transforms the vague idea of “fewer stars” into a concrete scene that demands a response.
Official witness – The final lines, “Add that to the report,” convert the poem into a legal or bureaucratic act. The speaker becomes a witness who must document what she has seen, however strange. The small shoes are the specific detail that makes the report—and the loss—undeniable.

Thus the symbol moves from doubt to ethical question to surreal evidence to active documentation. It embodies the collection’s broader arc: outliving a life and then choosing how to record the aftermath.

Character Connections

The symbol of small shoes does not directly involve the speaker’s family members, but it resonates with several characters in Goldenrod:

The speaker – In “Small Shoes,” the speaker is the one who sees the stars and orders the report. She is a witness by choice, not by accident. This aligns with her role throughout the book: a mother, daughter, and survivor who turns personal experience into testimony. The small shoes scene echoes her earlier claim in “Goldenrod” (chapter 3) that she would “let [the flower] name me” – a willingness to surrender control and be defined by the natural world.
The daughter – In “Planetarium in January” (chapter 36), the speaker sits beside her daughter under a dome of artificial stars. The daughter is present but nearly forgotten as the speaker escapes into imagination. The small-shoes stars, by contrast, are fallen and helpless. They may symbolically represent the vulnerability of children like the daughter, who depend on adults to see and report their losses.
The son – In “Confession” (chapter 34), the speaker holds her feverish son, feeling her own arms tremble. The small shoes of the stars could evoke the tiny feet of a sick child, needing care and naming. Both poems show the speaker in a protective, witnessing posture.
The speaker’s mother – In “Slipper,” the speaker recognizes herself becoming her mother in a swimsuit, her children digging shells. The slipper shell, like the small shoes, is a relic of a past life. The transitive nature of memory and loss across generations is a key concern.

By linking the star-shoes to these figures, the symbol becomes a lens for examining how family members see and fail to see each other’s disappearances.

Theme Connections

The small shoes symbol touches several central themes of Goldenrod:

Survival and resilience after loss – The epigraph (“…and then I outlived my life”) sets the stage for a speaker who must go on after something has ended. The stars in small shoes are survivors of a wreck; they have washed ashore, still wearing shoes. Their continued existence, though damaged, is a form of resilience. The speaker’s act of adding them to a report is an act of survival: she chooses to record rather than forget.
Motherhood and parental love – Small shoes are iconic of infancy and childhood. The speaker’s impulse to document the fallen stars mirrors a mother’s instinct to keep track of her children’s whereabouts and hurts. The poem can be read as an allegory for the parent’s duty to notice what is lost—even cosmic losses—and to give them a voice.
Memory and the past – The poem begins with a memory of childhood (“when I was a child”) that is already fading. The small shoes become a tangible anchor for a past that cannot be fully retrieved. Like the “tiny lipsticks” and “cherry trees” in “Talk of Horses,” the shoes are clues to a mystery the speaker is still solving.
Nature as mirror and metaphor – Stars are celestial bodies, normally above and untouchable. In Smith’s poem, they fall onto sand, becoming debris. Nature is not a sublime backdrop but a mirror of human fragility. The small shoes earth the stars in physical, human-scale objects, collapsing the distance between sky and ground.
Language, naming, and perception – The entire poem is an argument about the power of naming. The stars are only missing if someone names the absence. The small shoes become the specific noun-phrase that moves the loss from vague suspicion to documented fact. This echoes “Goldenrod,” where the flower does not care what it is called, and the speaker offers to be named by it. Language both obscures and reveals; the symbol of small shoes pins down a truth.

Study Questions and Answers

1. Why does the speaker insist on adding “the detail of the stars in small shoes” to the report?

Answer: The speaker recognizes that without specific, concrete details, a loss can be overlooked or denied. The stars’ small shoes transform an abstract idea (“fewer stars”) into a vivid, emotionally resonant image that demands acknowledgment. By insisting on the report, the speaker moves from passive observation to active witness, assuming responsibility for the loss. This act is central to the poem’s exploration of complicity and justice: a loss becomes a crime only when someone names it and records its particulars.

2. How do the small shoes connect to the theme of childhood innocence in Goldenrod?

Answer: Small shoes are universally associated with toddlers and early childhood. In the poem, they appear on stars—celestial, timeless beings—which suggests that even the cosmos is subject to a kind of infant vulnerability. The image evokes a child’s shoe lying abandoned on a beach, a potent symbol of lost innocence. Throughout the collection, the speaker reflects on her own children’s growth and on her own childhood memories (as in “Talk of Horses”). The small shoes crystallize the fear that innocence, like a star, can fall and become damaged, and that adults must bear witness to that fall.

3. What does the capsized boat represent, and why are stars on board?

Answer: The boat is a traditional symbol of journey, passage, and often of death (as in Charon’s ferry). Here, the boat carries stars—objects typically seen as fixed, eternal guides. The capsizing suggests a catastrophic disruption of order: the guides themselves have been lost or have failed. Stars also represent memory, hope, or the past: as the speaker notes, she cannot say which stars are missing. The boat’s wreck makes visible a loss that otherwise would remain invisible. The stars become casualties, and the small shoes ground their fall in human terms, making the loss relatable and urgent.

4. In what ways does “Small Shoes” echo the epigraph’s idea of outliving one’s life?

Answer: The epigraph from Forrest Gander says the speaker has “outlived her life.” This implies that a version of the self has ended—through divorce, death, or another rupture—and the speaker now exists in a strange, incomplete afterward. In “Small Shoes,” the stars have outlived their life in the sky; they now lie on the sand, facedown, still wearing their shoes. They persist in a diminished state. The speaker, too, has outlived something: the child who once looked at the stars without question. Now she must document the wreckage. The small shoes are the tangible sign of that survival: the shoes remain even when the stars no longer shine. Both the speaker and the stars are artifacts of a life that used to be.