Black Cat

The poem employs several similes. In a simile, usually recognizable by the introductory words “like” or “as,” poets compare one thing to a different thing in a way that brings out a similarity between them. A ghost, for example, “is like a place / your sight can knock on” (Lines 1-2), and the cat’s indifferent absorption of the human gaze gets compared to the effect on a troubled man as he pounds the walls of his cell: “just as a raving madman” (Line 5). This is an extended simile that takes up the entire stanza. The cat in Stanza 3 is “like an audience” (Line 10), a simile that suggests an audience witnessing a play, as she observes inside her all the accumulated looks of humans. The poem ends with a simile, in which the human being, as he observes the cat, sees himself in her eyes “like a prehistoric fly” (Line 16), suggesting a radical diminishment of how a man might normally see himself.

Mitchell’s translation of the poem consists of four four-line stanzas. Rilke’s original poem comprises two four-line stanzas, followed by one stanza of 10 lines. In that respect, then, Mitchell has made the form of the poem more traditional, while reducing the number of lines.