I would love to hear what your favourite cat poems are. I like to imagine the monk hard at work illuminating a manuscript with his white cat looking on. … and Pangur Bán (the scholar and his cat), an old Irish poem, written in the ninth century at or around Reichenau Abbey. ‘For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.įor, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.įor his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.įor he can tread to all the measures upon the music. This was also the book that introduced me to the magnificent Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart, which begins ‘For I will consider my cat Jeoffry’, When I get angry with God I can forgive him because he made cats – a divine and beautiful joke.’ He put together Cats Whispers and Tales: A Treasury of Stories and Poems as a tribute to them. Robert loved cats and always had several – he wrote in a letter to a friend ‘Cats to me are one of life’s great and certain plusses. I was lucky enough to work on a few of Robert Westall’s books – and happily look after Blitzcat and The Machine Gunners to this day. Lies the good gatto Foss, for sixteen years (Where, in his life, he’d often sprawl and snooze) ‘Deep in the garden of the Villa Tennyson, To In Sam Remo about Edward Lear’s cat Foss: I couldn’t sell Tim for a fortune’s fee.’ It is sublime and begins:Īt Polmear all day on the mound, on the pounceįor anything moving, rabbit or bird or mouse –Ĭharles wrote about cats too – from I Had A Little Cat in which our narrator takes his cat Tim Tom Tay to market to sell but ends up bringing him home again: When I was compiling Read Me: A Poem for Every Day of the Year Charles suggested that I include a poem by his friend A. Rupert was an excellent correspondent and I still have photos and postcards that he sent me. He had a magnificent ginger cat called Rupert. I probably know more about my author’s pets than any other part of their lives, and the very first author pet that I met belonged to Charles Causley. I have enjoyed seeing all the photos and videos of other people’s pets on social media and during work video calls. The Blue Cat – asks for food and sleeps on my bed. The Orange Cat sits by my computer as I work, next to me on the sofa as I read and follows me around in the garden digging up all of the things I have just planted. They have been very attentive while I have been at home. I have two cats who are fond of me, but not each other, and both well into middle age. I spent a long time thinking about what this blog would be about – most of it thinking about poems of hope and consolation, and some of it thinking about poems about spring, but in the end it turned out that what I was writing about was cats.

Charles causley poems list