Black Cat

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1923

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Black

The word “black” occurs repeatedly in the poem as motif, or recurring description. It appears in the title and in Stanza 1, Line 3, in the “thick black pelt” of the cat. In Rilke’s original, the German word for black, “Schwarze,” appears three times, but in Mitchell’s translation, the last occurrence is translated as “dark,” as in “dark night” (Line 6), which conveys the same feeling of blackness.

The emphasis on black is important. As the absence of color or light, it conveys the thematic idea that the blackness of the cat absorbs or cancels out whatever looks others direct at it. The looks contain certain varieties of color, metaphorically speaking, but they cannot endure in the deep interior blackness of the cat. There is just a sense here of the all-enveloping nature of blackness, as a kind of hidden dimension of life that swallows up everything in its vastness. The cat seems to embody it.

Hiding

If the lack of color in blackness absorbs everything to itself, hiding is another motif in the poem. Reality, the way things actually are, is not obvious and has to be teased out. Sometimes this may be difficult: What reality does a ghost represent, for example? What lies “behind” the ghost, so to speak, is not easy to determine. It represents a hidden reality that resists discovery.

The cat, too, resists discovery (incidentally, the cat is explicitly named “cat” only in the title, not in the poem itself). The reader must recognize or “find” the cat by its “thick black pelt” (Line 3). In the third stanza, Line 1, the cat hides things from view, that is, all the looks she has absorbed while seeming not to absorb them at all. It is her secret nature that has hidden them away, somewhere in herself. The cat is therefore more than she appears; she hides her true nature (until the unfolding of the deeper levels of that nature, which begins in Stanza 3).

The human speaker is in a sense hiding too, from the reality of his nature. He thus has something unexpected in common with the image of the troubled man, who wants to hide from the reality of his torment. The speaker desires to know about the cat but eventually finds that the cat reflects back to him a very different picture of himself than the one he habitually maintains. Although he is not conscious of doing so, he is hiding from himself, and it is the creature with the thick black pelt that reveals him to be a figure of considerably less stature than the man would admit. The man’s hiding might stem from the fact that he resembles nothing more than an ancient, fossilized fly.

Entrapment

The motif of entrapment runs through the poem. A ghost, at least in popular lore, is a departed soul doomed to wander unhappily around the places where it formerly lived. For some reason, it cannot move on; it remains trapped in a kind of limbo. Similarly, the troubled man remains trapped within his own tormented mind, as well as, literally, his padded cell. There is no escape for him, however much he might wish for it. The entrapment motif becomes explicit in the final line, when the speaker sees his own image trapped (“suspended”) within the amber eye of the cat. In fact, the only creature in the poem who is not in some way trapped is the cat.