To Mrs Reynolds’s Cat: Language, tone and structure

The tone of Keats’ poem is deliberately portentous and transforms the aged cat sitting on Keats’ lap and digging its claws into his knee into something much more adventurous. Keats may have been familiar with Thomas Gray’s mock-heroic Ode on the Death of a Favourite cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes, which has a similarly elevated tone.

 

The cat’s former power is suggested by ‘destroyed’ (line 3). It does not have claws but rather ‘talons’, like some mighty bird of prey. Like a warrior it has survived ‘frays’ with fish and mice. Keats imagines the cat as having been mauled by the fists of maids and even imagines it as a young knight entering the lists, proving its courage in some sort of tournament. 

 

However, the tone shifts at the end and Keats displays a finely judged sense of bathos in seeing the cat’s proving ground as merely a wall topped by shards of broken bottles.

 

The sonnet contains many instances of parody as well as elements of the mock heroic. The first line begins with the abrupt invocation ‘Cat!’ in the manner of a Miltonic sonnet and ends with the grand and esoteric word ‘climacteric’. There are other Miltonic features, such as the spreading of adjectives either side of the noun in ‘bright languid segments green’ (line 4).

 

Although the poem is a piece of light-hearted whimsy, Keats shows his mastery of form and language. Keats utilises a formal structure: a Petrarchan sonnet, recognisable by the rhyme-scheme abba abba in the octave and cdc cdc in the sestet. The octet sees the cat in heroic terms; the sestet cuts it down to size, focusing on its ‘dainty’ wrists, its ‘wheezy asthma’, its nicked off tail, its mauling at the fists of ‘many a maid’ and the fact that it has had to contend with the hazards of broken glass on the top of walls.

 

Keats only occasionally disrupts the iambic pentameter, inverting the first foot of the first line to give emphasis to his subject, and again in line 11 when the damage of the cat’s ‘tail’s tip’ being ‘nicked off’ is highlighted by two spondees. Then he adds extra syllables and intersperses two iambs with three anapests to convey the speed of the maids’ assaults in l.12.