Reading through Keats’s letters again has inspired Susan Wolfson to put together the following post on Keats and Cats. Wolfson considered that Keats was a cat person – unlike Byron and Wordsworth, for example, who were dog lovers. Did you know that the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome where Keats and Shelley are buried is also a haven for cats? Read about the history of the cat colony here.
Cats in the cemetery by the Pyramid of Caius Cestius. Image via Il Cimitero Acattolico di Roma website.
Why should the old Cat come to me?
The Cat is not an old Maid herself–
her daughter is a proof of it–
I have questioned her–
I have look’d at the lines of her paw–
I have felt her pulse–
to no purpose–
Why should the old Cat come to me?
I ask myself–
and myself
has not a word to answer.
The old cats who live
in the Protestant cemetery in Rome
faithfully, quietly to Keats’s grave have come
They sit among the violets
as if statues of themselves
with not a word to answer
(John Keats, 3 January 1819,
poetic forming by Susan Wolfson, 2 March 2018)
The graves of John Keats and Joseph Severn
Shelley’s grave
If you’d like some more feline-inspired verse, why not read Keats’s 1818 poem ‘To Mrs Reynold’s Cat’:
Cat! who hast pass’d thy grand climacteric,
How many mice and rats hast in thy days
Destroy’d? How many tit bits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green, and prick
Those velvet ears – but pr’ythee do not stick
Thy latent talons in me – and upraise
Thy gentle mew – and tell me all thy frays,
Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick.
Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists –
For all thy wheezy asthma – and for all
Thy tail’s tip is nick’d off – and though the fists
Of many a maid have given thee many a maul,
Still is that fur as soft, as when the lists
In youth thou enter’dest on glass bottled wall.
Additional images of the cemetery in Rome by Anna Mercer, 2016