Poetry and Animals

THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORY49

The velvet of her paws,

Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,

Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,

She saw; and purred applause.^30

The description suggests a creature who is admired because of its beauty
and character. Even the cat’s tail possesses a kind of consciousness.
Every action the cat makes in the poem is the result of apparent delibera-
tion, ultimately making its drowning in the fish bowl appear deserved,
as though it should have known better.

Presumptuous Maid! with looks intent

Again she stretch’d, again she bent

Nor knew the gulf between.

(Malignant Fate sat by, and smil’d)

The slipp’ry verge her feet beguil’d,

She tumbled headlong in.

At this point too the poem’s allegorical intentions become explicit; the
identification of the cat’s sex allows the narrator to begin his conflation
of cats and young women. The purpose of the fable comes in the final
stanza, where the narrator gives up the pretense of talking about cats.

From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,

Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved,

And be with caution bold.

Not all that tempts your wandering eyes

And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;

Nor all that glisters, gold.

The lesson for young women readers, who are presumably fond of cats,
is to tame their own apparently instinctive desire for shiny objects,
which is likened to a cat’s attraction to fish. Indeed, the whole poem
implies a strong correlation between women and cats through the qual-
ities of narcissism, superficial longing, and shallow physicality. What is