Gray's ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat’: A Rationalist's Aesthetic

ROBERT PATTISON Gray's 'Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat': A Rationalist's Aesthetic Thomas Gray's friend, Horace Walpole, owned two cats, Zara and Selima, and it was Selima who, at Walpole's London home, probably early in 1747, met the fate that evoked the poet's celebrated 'Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes.' It is a poem the continuing popularity of which as a mock elegy has perhaps obscured the classical and philosophical sources of its wit, for the ode is firmly rooted not only in Latin and Greek sources, but in the prevailing aesthetic of Gray's time, rationalism. The indebtedness is apparent in the history of the composition of the poem. With a zeal for historical accuracy typical in a man whose life's work was the'preparation of a series of chronological tables collating all the known events of ancient history, Gray wrote to Walpole to be sure which of the two cats it was whom he should apostrophize: 'As one ought to be particularly careful to avoid blunders in a compliment of condolence, it would be a sensible satisfaction to me (before I testify my sorrow, and the sincere part I take in your misfortune) to know for certain, who it is I lament. '1 Here, the desire for accuracy is as real as the wit with which it is demanded, and the resulting ode, for all its mock solemnity, is as empirical a rendition of the facts surrounding Selima's demise as was possible for the poet to make; indeed, the 'lofty vase: just as Gray described it, was for many years displayed by Walpole at Strawberry Hill: 'Twas on a lofty vase's side, Where China's gayest art had dy'd The azure flowers, that blow; Demurest of the tabby kind, The pensive Selima redin'd, Gazed on the lake below. (1-6) Selima is set in a classical perspective: the waters of the tub are a lake; the cat herself later becomes a nymph and the goldfish 'Genii of the stream.' This is a wit of hyperbole and irony, here applied in the manner of the classics and the English imitators of the classics. The concept of the poem as an ode is taken from Pindar, whom Gray had been reading in the same month he composed his elegy to Selima; the style of mock lament UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLIX, NUMBER 2 , WINTER 1979/80 0042-0247/B%lOO-0156$o1.50/0@UNIVERSITYOFTORONTOPRESS over a dead pet is similarly derived from ancient sources, most notably from Catullus's third song, 'Lugete, 0 Veneres Cupidinesque: but also from twenty-seven poems in the Greek Anthology on the same theme (7.189-216), one of which (7.205) is specifically addressed to a cat caught poaching; and the metrical form of the verse is in part an imitation of Dryden's'Alexander's Feast.'2 There are in this first stanza, then, several characteristics of the aesthetic out of which Gray was working: an eighteenth-century rationalist's love of accuracy and detail, a Renaissance gentleman's manipulation of classical sources, and a lambent wit playing over the whole surface of the work. But more noteworthy than this conglomeration of influences and predilections is the economy with which Gray proceeds, for each of his words and all his descriptions in this ode are put to good use. DrJohnson condemned the line, 'The azure flowers, that blow: as showing how 'resolutely a rhyme is sometimes made when it cannot easily be found: and Wordsworth, as is well known from the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, felt that Gray 'was more than any other man curiously elaborate in the structure of his own poetic diction" - he would, I think, have attacked 'pensive' in this first stanza as representative of the falsely elaborate diction he opposed. Indeed, if the 'lofty vase' with its 'azure flowers' and the description of Selima as 'pensive' served only the function of ironic ornamentation in the poem, they would deserve these censures. We shall return to the rationale behind the 'azure flowers: but 'pensive: at least...