62POEMS OF THE ANIMALon humanity. Robert Frost frequently used animals this way in his
poetry. In his poem “The Bear” the narrator describes the bumbling
movements of a bear (on “her cross-country in the fall”) to make the
larger point that “the world has room to make a bear feel free; / The uni-
verse feels cramped to you and me.” The bear represents the idea of the
animal as unselfconscious and simply existing, in contrast to which
“man acts more like the poor bear in a cage, / That all day fights a nervous
inward rage.”^16 In “White-Tailed Hornet” the narrator gives a long and
detailed account of the speaker’s interactions with and observations of
a hornet. In the first paragraph of the poem the narrator comically
recounts his being stung by the hornet, even though he meant it no
harm, an action he ascribes to the hornet’s instinct. The second verse
paragraph describes the hornet apparently hunting for a fly, mistakenly
attacking (or so the narrator surmises) nailheads and a huckleberry.
While Frost’s narrator makes a number of self-deprecating statements
about his attempt to understand the hornet, the final verse paragraph
of the poem leads to a broader comparison of human and animal,
with the hornet serving as a comically puny proxy for humans. Inter-
estingly, the narrator’s thoughts center on how we make the distinc-
tion. “To err is human, not to, animal,” he neatly asserts. That is, in
ascribing animal behavior entirely to instinct, and in imagining free
will as a defining quality of human intelligence, we define ourselves as
creatures uniquely capable of error—which the behavior of the hornet
belies. The poem’s explicit message is that when “our comparisons were
stoutly upward / With gods and angels, we were men at least.... / But
once comparisons were yielded downward,... / ’Twas disillusion upon
disillusion.”^17 The double point here is that human self-conception has
in fact declined, which the narrator notes with at least some regret in the
tragicomic lines “We were lost piecemeal to the animals, / Like people
thrown out to delay the wolves.” We are no longer divine, and we are no
longer even a genuinely distinctive animal, since we have found “wor-
ship, humor, conscientiousness” in the “dogs under the table” and even
“fallibility” in the hornet.^18
Margaret Atwood’s poem “The Animals of That Country” also uses
the idea of the animal as a way of reflecting some large truth about