After my initial reading of this poem I felt the need to
re-examine Gray's words with the notion that perhaps the cat is a metaphor for
a narcissistic upper-class woman, or perhaps women in general. The cat is given
several features that are not quite anthropomorphized; however, they could be
used to describe a rich woman who meets societal beauty standards. She has a
"fair round face" (8), velvety paws (9), she sports a "coat,
that with the tortoise vies," (10), and she has "emerald eyes"
(11). Though this is a clear description of a cat (can't deny those paws,
claws, and whiskers mentioned in the poem), the language Gray uses evokes an
image of expensiveness- almost royalty. The first two stanzas focus on the cat
becoming vainly lost in her own reflection in the water of a China vase, though
in the last line of the first stanza, Gray compares to vase to "the lake
below" (5). I can't help but envision a fair-skinned woman wearing a
lavish fur coat and expensive jewels staring at her reflection in the still
water of a lake. Gray goes on to refer to the cat as a "hapless
Nymph" (19) and a "presumptuous maid" (25)- both of which are
terms that have more womanly (human) connotations than animalistic ones.
The heart
of this interpretation is in the last two lines of the fourth stanza:
"What female heart can gold despise? / What cat's averse to fish?"
(23-24). This highlights the idea that while this poem is directly describing a
cat, the cat's situation can be compared to greedy/vain women (or I suppose
humans in general, but femininity is a strong theme in this poem). This is
solidified in the last stanza, as it stands alone as moral forewarning, while
the rest of the poem can be mapped out as describing narcissism (stanzas 1 and
2), temptation (stanzas 3 and 4) and the consequences of such things (stanzas 5
and 6).
With this
reading of the poem, the tone becomes more satirical. It is an ode, though it
is not traditionally as solemn as odes tend to be- is Gray really aiming to
mourn the death of the cat, or is he using subtle humor (for lack of a better
word) to emphasize the dire results of self-absorption?
I don't think Gray is so bold to be satirical in a cruel sense. Shelly's "Ode to the West Wind" and Keats's "To Autumn" come to mind in the sense that both poems are not centered on the heroic aspect of what a pre romantic ode should be, but more of lyrical crisis of self that is being discovered as the poem progresses. Gray mourns for the cat because he was the cat in the poem. He finds salvation through existential failure, not obtaining the fish, and is now forced to look back from a third person POV or as a new cat, if that metaphor works, meowing warnings to other cats.
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