Black Cat

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1923

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Nature of a Cat

Millions of people today devotedly keep cats as pets, regarding them as part of the family. The cats themselves, if Rilke’s poem is anything to go by, might have a different opinion; they inhabit a state of awareness that is quite different from what their human caregivers might fondly imagine. Rilke mentioned cats only rarely in his poetry, but he did contribute a five-page preface to an album of 40 ink drawings that was made by a 12-year-old boy who went on to become the artist known as Balthus (1908-2001). Balthus was the son of Rilke’s close friend Baladine Klossowska (known as Merline). His drawings featured a stray kitten named Mitsou that Balthus brought home. The cat disappeared after one year, leaving the boy devastated. The book was published in 1921.

Rilke’s preface sheds light on “Black Cat.” “Does anyone know cats?” he asks at the beginning . “Cats are just that: cats,” he continued, in a passage that accurately reflects the theme of “Black Cat,” which Rilke had written some 12 years earlier:

And their world is utterly, through and through, a cat’s world. You think they look at us? Has anyone ever truly known whether or not they deign to register for one instant on the sunken surface of their retina our trifling forms? As they stare at us they might merely be eliminating us magically from their gaze, eternally replete (as quoted by Dominic Pettman in his article “Electric Caresses: Rilke, Balthus, and Mitsou,” in Cabinet Magazine, Fall 2015.)

In the preface, Rilke also advised those who love cats to remember the “strange, brusque, and offhand way in which their favorite animal frequently cuts short the effusions they had fondly imagined to be reciprocal.”

As that passage suggests, for Rilke, a cat barely acknowledges the existence of humans, a notion supported by the following remark, also from the preface to the boy’s book: “[S]ometimes, in the twilight, the cat next door pounces across and through my body, either unaware of me or as demonstration to some eerie spectator that I really don’t exist.”

Thus the black cat in the poem seems to cancel and make nothing out of all the looks it receives. Despite all the attention lavished on it, it remains inviolate—untouched and aloof. It also, in Stanza 4, has the ability to hold those looks and regard them with detachment whenever it chooses, and in a way that only a cat could understand.

Subject-Object Interaction

In the object or “thing poems,” Rilke strove for objectivity, excluding his own feelings about the topic. In “Black Cat,” he attempts to describe the deeper aspects of the cat’s being, to penetrate it and really see it. The cat is aloof and indifferent, and there appears to be no essential relationship between cat and man. The cat, with her “thick black pelt,” repels all attempts to engage with it through visual means—a glance or gaze or stare. The cat lives in a different world. This aspect of the poem resembles another object poem from New Poems, titled “Buddha.” The statue of the Buddha absorbs the human gaze but returns nothing, whatever a person does: “if we threw ourselves before him / He’d remain deep and idle as a cat” (Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems, translated by Edward Snow, 2001, p. 47).

The attempt at knowing, however, also represents an imaginative leap on the part of the perceiving subject, the man. “Black Cat” may be a thing poem, but it is immensely imaginative in its visual imagery: a ghost, an institutionalized man, a cat, and he who wishes to understand the cat. Moreover, with the turn in the thought that begins in the second part of the last line of Stanza 3, the cat does actually engage with the human: “she turns her face to yours” (Line 12), and now a subject-object relationship emerges.

In his introduction to New Poems, Edward Snow comments that some kind of “ontological redefinition” (Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems, translated by Edward Snow, 2001, p. 6), in which the essential nature of something is perceived differently from before, is typical of the poems in this collection. Thus in “Black Cat,” the cat reveals herself to be more capacious, more all-encompassing than the mysterious, opaque, attention-repelling creature imagined in the first part of the poem (although not more benign). Perception also becomes two-way: man perceives cat; cat perceives man, and the man too is transformed, since he now sees himself as being, in a sense, inside the cat. Perhaps he is seeing himself as the cat sees him, which cannot be a pleasant experience, as the final line of the poem indicates.

Insignificance of the Human

If a visitor from Mars were to evaluate humans and cats based solely on a reading of Rilke’s poem, such a creature would likely get the impression that the cat is a mystical, quasi-divine figure with occult powers—the power to deflect and annihilate unwanted attention directed toward it—while a man might come across as a disturbed and insignificant thing.

In the poem, a man is a creature startled by ghosts, and such encounters reverberate in his mind; he can also go quite “mad” and rant and rave in a padded cell until he exhausts himself. When the cat he has been observing deigns to turn her imperious attention on him, he shrinks, seeing himself in the cat’s amber eyes as “tiny” (Line 14), of no more significance than an extinct fly. It would be hard to think of a more devastating image for a proud, deluded man. He is clearly a smaller and lesser being than the cat. While the cat remains forever free, expanded and in charge, watching like an audience witnessing a play, the human remains trapped in those all-seeing eyes by his own nature, as if accused. Darting hither and thither, his wavering mind and senses constantly distract him; he hardly knows a moment of peace. He cannot even take rest as calmly as the cat in the poem, who sleeps undisturbed by all the looks directed at her a thousand times over. It is as if, in his weakness, the man is a victim of the cat, which holds him in a shrunken, emasculated form. Perhaps the man is actually giving himself up, so envious of the capaciousness, steadiness, and self-possession of the cat’s being, which he senses but cannot emulate. Compared to the cat, he is as close to being nothing as the “prehistoric fly” (Line 16).