Cat
The fat cat on the mat
may seem to dream
of nice mice that suffice
for him, or cream;
but he free, maybe,
walks in thought
unbowed, proud, where loud
roared and fought
his kin, lean and slim,
or deep in den
in the East feasted on beasts
and tender men.
The giant lion with iron
claw in paw,
and huge ruthless tooth
in gory jaw;
the pard dark-starred,
fleet upon feet,
that oft soft from aloft
leaps upon his meat
where woods loom in gloom --
far now they be,
fierce and free,
and tamed is he;
but fat cat on the mat
kept as a pet
he does not forget.
Commentary
A beautiful poem that’s a bit more than it seems. The Red Book has several verses, some of which figure in the Lord of the Rings, or in the attached stories / preludes / interludes and such. Others are just scrawled in the margins, for possible inclusion. JRR had scribbled “SG” in the margin when he wrote the poem, suggesting that he meant to attribute it to Sam Gamgee. The poem is also fairly traditional hobbit poetry (which deals a lot with birds and beasts): rhythmic, with frequent alliteration and assonance, making for an excellent nursery-rhyme sort of singalong song.
Still, it makes you think. Contrast a cute cat sleeping in front of a fire with a wild, roaring and dangerous lion - and then have Tolkien solemnly inform you in the last line that the cat hasn’t forgotten her wild ancestry…
— Suresh
Thomas adds
Just a word on prosody: “Cat” may seem on first reading to be merely a ‘hobbit nursery-rhyme’, but the technical mastery it displays is nothing short of staggering. The even-numbered lines rhyme with each other and also internally; the odd-numbered ones have internal triple rhymes. And all this is done in lines of two and three feet respectively, leaving barely any room for error; every single word (other than the placeholders - prepositions conjunctions and auxiliaries) seems to be part of the rhyme scheme. Incredible.
Minstrels Links
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien:
Poem #4, The Road Goes Ever On
Poem #46, Lament for Boromir
Poem #93, Eärendil was a mariner
Poem #142, He chanted a song of wizardry
Poem #220, Lament for Eorl the Young
Poem #257, Three Rings for the Elven Kings
Poem #318, Tall ships and tall kings
Poem #370, Troll sat alone on his seat of stone
Poem #440, Bregalad’s Lament
Poem #643, The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon
Poem #736, The world was young, the mountains green
Cats, practical and otherwise:
Poem #165, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat – Edward Lear
Poem #167, Pangur Ban – Anon. (Irish, 8th century)
Poem #258, Macavity: The Mystery Cat – T. S. Eliot
Poem #273, How a Cat Was Annoyed and a Poet Was Booted – Guy Wetmore Carryl
Poem #282, Fog – Carl Sandburg
Poem #401, To a Cat – Jorge Luis Borges
Poem #572, Mort aux Chats – Peter Porter
Poem #574, Growltiger’s Last Stand – T. S. Eliot
Poem #575, To Mrs Reynolds’ Cat – John Keats
Poem #577, The Cat and the Moon – William Butler Yeats
Poem #659, Poem – William Carlos Williams
Poem #660, On a Night of Snow – Elizabeth Coatsworth
Poem #661, Jubilate Agno – Christopher Smart
Poem #662, Cat – Jibanananda Das
Poem #663, A Child’s Nightmare – Robert Graves
Poem #674, Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers – Adrienne Rich
Poem #727, Milk for the Cat – Harold Monro
Poem #955, Gus: The Theatre Cat – T. S. Eliot
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Reed C. Bowman · 25 February 2002
Always thrilled to read Tolkien I’ve never seen before. Thanks, Suresh!
This piece reminds me strongly of (and may have been an inspiration for) an episode in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, called “A Dream of a Thousand Cats”, in which a sort of prophet or proselyte among cats is wandering the world trying to convince other cats that once they were giants (elephant-size, not lion-size), and that by a concerted effort of dreaming, their one-time prey and playthings, humans, had reversed the sizes of humans and cats, and reduced the cats to pets. The prophet cat was trying to reverse this by getting a thousand cats to dream the same dream, of their return to their former state of dominance, all at once. But, as one of her listeners remarked, “I would like to see ANYONE–prophet, king or GOD–persuade a thousand cats to do ANYTHING at the same time. No, it will never happen.”
RCB
Eleanor Durrant · 1 July 2003
Tolkien told us never to confuse applicability with allegory, and I daresay this poem is about a cat. But I like to apply it to the domesticated human being, working in an office, watching TV, fixing the aircon, but dreaming, perhaps, of fire, and the dark sky, the evening star, a spear in the hand, and grass under the feet.
Eleanor
Megan Baker · 3 January 2004
Every time I visit this site, I always read this poem. I am a devout Tolkien fan, so I may be a abit biased, but this poem holds great power, and goes far beyond beasts. Sam Gamgee always appeared to be a respectable hobbit, never wanting to do anything truly exciting, or have any adventures. But really, he was like Bilbo, and he loved adventures, but he just needed a little push out the door. After his involvement with the ring, and cleaning the Shire, his adventuresome side was quite exhausted, but Sam, like the fat cat on the mat, he does not forget.
Megan
Wilson Bruce · 11 January 2005
Robert Frost, paraphrasing Horace, said that a poem is a thing “beginning in delight and ending in wisdom.” ‘Fat cat on the mat’ is often the first time a child learning to read encounters rhyme, and from this simple beginning comes one of the most profound meditations on felis domesticus in English.
Anent the other writer’s comment that it is equally applicable to the ‘domesticated’ human dreaming of ‘heroic’ times, I had never thought of that, but it is applicable.
Kathleen Bridgewater · 1 March 2007
Thanks for this site! My sixth graders are delighted with Tolkien’s “Cat”. It is a rewarding core of a vocabulary study we did this week. Go hunting for a pard, if you will! (Will it be hunting for you?) No one has mentioned the alliteration that my students noticed as important to creating a medieval tone. We are reading Beowulf: A New Telling in which Robert Nye uses the techniques of Anglo-Saxon poetry in a prose rendition. “Cat” has some of the same flavor, intentionally I think. A loose Beowulf-Cat connection is the concept of dreaming backward through generations to a powerful ancestor in order to garner strength for oneself: The Anglo-Saxon king who commissioned monks to record the four hundred year-old poem may have sought political strength by connecting himself to Scyld Skefing. Christian (domesticated) though he may be, a “divine right” to the monarchy could be implied through the ages from the Odin-conferred chieftain at whose shout enemies dropped down dead. The king may have wanted his people to “not forget”.
Kathleen
Mark A. Mandel · 13 January 2008
I think there’s an error in line 20 of your #1008, Tolkien’s “Cat”:
the pard dark-starred, 17
fleet upon feet,
that oft soft from aloft
leaps upon his meat 20
That should be “leaps on his meat”, not “upon”, which has an extra syllable, and which I think was mistakenly carried over from line 18. Check the source. I don’t have the book handy now, but I see that other Web versions have “on” in line 20. (Search for “the pard dark-starred”.)
[BTW, is “change not” supposed to be in the subject line? It’s hardcoded in your mailto link for this poem and apparently all the others.]
Mark A. Mandel