I know people who enjoy going to the zoo.

I believe the exhilaration they seek and find.

It shines in their eyes, they gesture freely,

And laugh from some uncaged place in the mind.

But about animals, any animals, I cannot feel

That admiration or envy or pleasurable fear.

They move suddenly. They make rank smells.

Some animalophiles are connoisseurs. I hear

The London zoo compared with the one in Vienna,

And oh the French zoos! Ah Berlin in the old days!

This is twice foreign to me. I would not turn

To see buffalo on my neighbor's lawn graze.

By as much as it is out of place I am outraged.

The parakeets, mice, and spaniels of my friends

Are not my friends. Let cats keep their place,

Lest equality be where acquaintance ends.

The worst about animals is that they cannot talk.

For guessing what they think we get no thanks.

I was not born that I might be physician,

Stable-hand, and conscience to fish in tanks.

The next worst is that some look a little human ,

Have five toes, or baggy behinds, or white teeth.

Amusing, but unimportant, and whatever

Their place in order, it is still beneath,

Unless man mindlessly unbloods himself, a man.

The animals are objectionable in the least

When their life-cycles are not prolonged.

Useless or used, there is no noble beast.

My kind of animal is human and is in me,

The male and the female. Of these, I have known,

From books, da Vinci, Goethe, Ovid, and Montaigne;

In life, hundreds, towers of green leaves blown,

Ladies for marrying, and by them girls and sons.

Women are wonders, but for men I am most proud.

They are not, but know what perfection is,

And words for it, which they articulate aloud.