The Poetry of Animals

Photo by: Christine Attardo

Table of Contents

Robert Frost: - The Bear- The Oven Bird- The Pasture

William Butler Yeats:- The Circus Animal’s Desertion- The Cat and the Moon- The White Birds

Robert Frost

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“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”

--Robert Frost

“The Bear”

The bear puts both arms around the tree above herAnd draws it down as if it were a lover

And its chokecherries lips to kiss good-by,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 staplesAs 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 restsThe me-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 spreadOr if he rests from scientific tread,

‘Tis only to sit back and sway his headThrough 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 GreekWhich may be thought, but only so to speak.

A baggy figure, equally patheticWhen sedentary and when peripatetic.

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www.mvls.info/familiessing/clipart/index.html

“The Oven Bird”

There is a singer everyone has heard,Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showersOn sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birdsBut that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but wordsIs what to make of a diminished thing.

www.baap.lt/codes_gap/poland/part_a.htm

“The Pasture”

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):I shan’t be gone long. -- You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calfThat’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.I shan’t be gone long. -- You come too.

William Butler Yeats

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“Educaton is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

--William Butler Yeats

“The Circus Animals’ Desertion” I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain, I sought it daily for six weeks or so. Maybe at last, being but a broken

man, I must be satisfied with my heart, although Winter and summer till old age began My circus animals were all on

show, Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

IIWhat can I but enumerate old themes, First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose Through three enchant-

ed islands, allegorical dreams, Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose, Themes of the embittered heart, or so it

seems, That might adorn old songs or courtly shows; But what cared I that set him on to ride, I, starved for the bo-

som of his faery bride. And then a counter-truth filled out its play, ‘The Count-

ess Cathleen’ was the name I gave it; She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away, But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it. I thought my dear must her own soul destroy So did fanaticism and hate enslave it, And this brought forth

a dream and soon enough This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread Cuchu-lain fought the ungovernable sea; Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said It was the dream itself enchanted me: Character isolated by a deed To engross the present and dominate memory. Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.

IIIThose masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the

sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a bro-ken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who

keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop

of the heart.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXd4c10nN38

www.catspictures.net/2008/09/cat-and-moon.html

“The Cat and the Moon”

The cat went here and there And the moon spun round like a top, And the nearest kin of the moon, The creeping cat,

looked up. Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon, For, wander and wail as he would, The pure cold light in the sky Troubled his animal blood. Minnaloushe runs in the

grass Lifting his delicate feet. Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance? When two close kindred meet, What bet-ter than call a dance? Maybe the moon may learn, Tired of that courtly fashion, A new dance turn. Minnaloushe

creeps through the grass From moonlit place to place, The sacred moon overhead Has taken a new phase. Does

Minnaloushe know that his pupils Will pass from change to change, And that from round to crescent, From cres-

cent to round they range? Minnaloushe creeps through the grass Alone, important and wise, And lifts to the changing

moon His changing eyes.

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“The White Birds”

Would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea! We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it

can fade and flee; And the flame of the blue star of twi-light, hung low on the rim of the sky, Has awakened in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die. A wea-riness comes from those dreamers, dew-dabbled, the lily

and rose; Ah, dream not of them, my beloved, the flame of the meteor that goes, Or the flame of the blue star that

lingers hung low in the fall of the dew: For I would we were changed to white birds on the wandering foam: I and you! I

am haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore, Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come

near us no more; Soon far from the rose and the lily, and fret of the flames would we be, Were we only white birds, my

beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!