This episode was featured in "CBS: On the Air," a week long 50th anniversary special, despite the fact it originally aired on NBC, during its run on that network.
The poem Jim reads by William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) is "To a Waterfowl." Bryant often wrote about nature and the moral compass it offers humans. The poem was first published in 1818, composed of eight stanzas of four lines each that consistently sandwich two lines of iambic pentameter between two lines of iambic trimeter in an ABAB rhyme scheme. JIm recites, then reads from stanzas 4, 5, and 8.