Analysis of The Bear
Robert Frost 1874 (San Francisco) – 1963 (Boston)
The bear puts both arms around the tree above her
And 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 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 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 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.
Scheme | AABBCCDDEEFFGGHHIIJJKKKLLMMNOOOOPP |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 011110101010 01111110010 01111111 1111101001 0111010101 1100110001 011101100110 111100111010 10111010111 11011101 0111110111 010111101 1111011001 1111010101 1101011101 1101010101 0111010111 010111111 010101010 1100110101 0001010101 111110101 1101110111 1101011111 011010001 111110101 1101011101 111010111 0101111111 1101010111 101001010101 1111110111 01010100010 1100010010 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,405 |
Words | 270 |
Sentences | 11 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 34 |
Lines Amount | 34 |
Letters per line (avg) | 33 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 1,124 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 268 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 27, 2023
- 1:21 min read
- 657 Views
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