Classic Poem

His dam lay, powerless now to help,
White fur on snow with one red stain;
A sailor caught the snarling whelp,
Who never swam the seas again.

Huge now, he lies behind the bars,
Stretches, and gapes, and idly rolls:
Too soft to face the winds and stars
That freeze above the icy poles.

Mangy and yellow-toothed and old
He lies, and lolls an inky tongue;
Yet in his brain's most inward fold
Still lives the world where he was young.

For still he keeps the sharp fish-head,
The sloping shoulder, the round limbs,
To cleave the water, for the dread
Of all that by the icefield swims.

Still upon keen, clear frosty days
There comes a stirring in his blood,
Inklings of his forefathers' ways,
Of prey and battle in the flood.

He scents the blood of what they slew,
He dreams, what he can never feel,
How the snatched salmon quivers through,
And how they tore the oily seal.

Forward and backward, like the tide,
With ceaseless motion shambling slow,
He sways himself from side to side,
As if he rode the rocking floe.

Or in his tank — how cramped and small
After wide waters of the pole!
Contemptuously from wall to wall
He surges with great wallowing roll.

He loves no keeper's hand; cold rage
Haunts him for ever in his cell;
Thus far he keeps his heritage,
Tameless and unapproachable.