Poetry and Animals

50THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORY

perhaps most striking about the poem, though, is the seemingly sadis-
tic delight the narrator takes in describing the cat’s drowning:

Eight times emerging from the flood

She mewed to every watery god,

Some speedy aid to send.

No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred;

Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard;

A favorite has no friend!

Though the hyperbole and allusion are typical of the mock epic mode,
the passage also implies a strange voyeurism, as reader and narrator
watch the cat meet its drawn out and apparently deserved fate. The poem
mocks the sympathy female readers would be presumed to have for the
cat, at the same time threatening a vaguely similar dark fate for heed-
less women. The real mystery of the poem’s allegory is the drowning of
the cat. What kind of punishment for women does this imply?
The poem is an arch joke, of course, which perhaps explains its endur-
ing popularity. A serious poet may waste a bit of his time on the low
form of animal fable (or animal epitaph) only if it is deeply ironic, works
hard at making explicit its lessons to young women, or was written for
private rather than public consumption. At the same time, the poem has
in fact entered the canon and remained popular and interesting to read-
ers over several centuries, and this needs some explaining. Whatever
Gray’s motives, or his understanding of the poem’s readership, the
poem reflects, and perhaps contributes to, a hardening of attitudes
toward animal allegory—that animals in poetry cannot be taken seri-
ously and must refer to something else. The poem puts animals firmly
in their place. Readers in addition to Walpole have presumably found it
amusing to see the sad fate of the cat turned into a moral lesson for
young women, and to play with the associations of cat and women that
the poem finally brings out into the open. It is also clever to create a
fable about a real cat rather than an imagined one. The other allegories
I have discussed are about generic animals, yet are more deeply ambig-
uous about the relation between human and animal, and more open to