The bear puts both arms around the tree above her <br />And draws it down as if it were a lover <br />And its choke cherries lips to kiss good-bye, <br />Then lets it snap back upright in the sky. <br />Her next step rocks a boulder on the wall <br />(She's making her cross-country in the fall). <br />Her great weight creaks the barbed-wire in its staples <br />As she flings over and off down through the maples, <br />Leaving on one wire moth a lock of hair. <br />Such is the uncaged progress of the bear. <br />The world has room to make a bear feel free; <br />The universe seems cramped to you and me. <br />Man acts more like the poor bear in a cage <br />That all day fights a nervous inward rage <br />His mood rejecting all his mind suggests. <br />He paces back and forth and never rests <br />The me-nail click and shuffle of his feet, <br />The telescope at one end of his beat <br />And at the other end the microscope, <br />Two instruments of nearly equal hope, <br />And in conjunction giving quite a spread. <br />Or if he rests from scientific tread, <br />'Tis only to sit back and sway his head <br />Through ninety odd degrees of arc, it seems, <br />Between two metaphysical extremes. <br />He sits back on his fundamental butt <br />With lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut, <br />(lie almost looks religious but he's not), <br />And back and forth he sways from cheek to cheek, <br />At one extreme agreeing with one Greek <br />At the other agreeing with another Greek <br />Which may be thought, but only so to speak. <br />A baggy figure, equally pathetic <br />When sedentary and when peripatetic.<br /><br />Robert Lee Frost<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/bear-the/
