"The Bear" by Robert Frost - anthology.

"The Bear" by Robert Frost - anthology. By titling his collection of poems West-Running Brook (1928), American poet Robert Frost was hinting that his poems would explore the theme of going against the grain. The rivers in Frost's beloved New England generally flow east, rather than west. In "The Bear," published as part of this collection, the poem's narrator contrasts bear and man, asserting that man's philosophical inquiries and scientific studies can make him a blind, comical, and pathetic creature. Frost's poems appear simple at first glance, but reveal themselves to be subtle and enigmatic upon further scrutiny. The Bear By Robert Frost The bear puts both arms round the tree above her And draws it down as if it were a lover And its choke-cherries lips to kiss goodby, Then lets it snap back upright in the sky. Her next step rocks a boulder on the wall. (She's making her cross-country in the fall.) Her great weight creaks the barbed wire in its staples As she flings over and off down through the maples, Leaving on one wire tooth a lock of hair. Such is the uncaged progress of the bear. The world has room to make a bear feel free. The universe seems cramped to you and me. Man acts more like the poor bear in a cage That all day fights a nervous inward rage, His mood rejecting all his mind suggests. He paces back and forth and never rests The toe-nail click and shuffle of his feet, The telescope at one end of his beat, And at the other end the microscope, Two instruments of nearly equal hope, And in conjunction giving quite a spread. Or if he rests from scientific tread, 'Tis only to sit back and sway his head Through ninety-odd degrees of arc it seems, Between two metaphysical extremes. He sits back on his fundamental butt With lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut (He almost looks religious but he's not), And back and forth he sways from cheek to cheek, At one extreme agreeing with one Greek, At the other agreeing with another Greek, Which may be thought but only so to speak. A baggy figure equally pathetic When sedentary and when peripatetic. Source: Frost, Robert. "The Bear." The Nation, April 18, 1928.