Black Cat

“Black Cat” was written by Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the most renowned poets of the 20th century. The title in German is “Schwarze Katze.” Rilke wrote the poem in the summer of 1908, when he was living in Paris. It was published in the second part of his New Poems (Neue Gedichte) in the same year. While in Paris, Rilke studied with the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), who suggested that Rilke spend time studying objects closely until he felt he could grasp their essential nature. Rilke took Rodin’s advice and wrote a number of what he called “thing poems” (Dinggedichte), of which “Black Cat” is an example. These poems represented a departure from Rilke’s earlier work, in which he described exalted states of feeling. In the “thing poems” he switched from subjective to objective mode, excluding himself from the poem. Thus “Black Cat” presents the mysterious, self-absorbed, and self-contained nature of the cat, which is indifferent to human attention. The New Poems are regarded as among Rilke’s finest achievements and represent a distinct phase in his poetic career. In his later work, such as the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies, he returned to a more subjective approach. “Black Cat” has been translated into English by Stephen Mitchell, Edward Snow, and others.

Poet Biography

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague, in Bohemia, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on December 4, 1875. He was the son of Josef, a railroad official, and Sophie Rilke. Rilke’s parents divorced in 1884, and Rilke attended a military school from 1886 to 1891 and a trade school in Linz for a year after that. He showed little interest in business, however, and in 1895 he entered the Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague to study philosophy. He switched to law studies but then moved to Munich in September 1896 to study art history.

By this time Rilke was already writing poetry, essays, and plays. In Munich, he formed a close relationship with the writer and critic Lou Andreas Salomé. Between 1897 and 1900, Rilke traveled to Italy and Russia, where he met Leo Tolstoy. In 1901, he married the sculptor Clara Westhoff, and that year they had a daughter, Ruth. They lived in Westerwede, near Bremen, Germany, but financial troubles resulted in Rilke leaving for Paris in August 1902. He had been commissioned to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. It was also in 1902 that the first poetic work of Rilke’s maturity appeared. This was The Book of Pictures (Das Buch der Bilder). It was followed in 1905 by The Book of Hours (Das Stundenbuch). New Poems, First Part appeared in 1907 and New Poems, Second Part, which included “Black Cat,” in 1908.

Rilke was always a traveler, and between 1910 and 1912 he visited North Africa, Spain, and other places in Europe. In 1910, his only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, was published. World War I broke out in August 1914, and the following year Rilke was drafted into the Austrian Army. He served in a government office in Vienna and was discharged a year later. After the war, Rilke became a citizen of the newly created state of Czechoslovakia. In 1921, he settled in Switzerland at the Castle Muzot, near the village of Sierre. There he completed the 10 Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien), which he had begun in 1912. The elegies are often considered to be his finest work. Rilke also wrote the 55 poems that constitute Sonnets to Orpheus (Sonnette an Orpheus) in 1923.

Rilke died of leukemia on December 29, 1926, at the age of 51, in Valmont sur Territet, in Switzerland.

Poem Text

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place

your sight can knock on, echoing; but here

within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze

will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

just as a raving madman, when nothing else

can ease him, charges into his dark night

howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels

the rage being taken in and pacified.

She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen

into her, so that, like an audience,

she can look them over, menacing and sullen,

and curl to sleep with them. But all at once

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;

and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,

inside the golden amber of her eyeballs

suspended, like a prehistoric fly.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. “Black Cat.” 1908. Translated by Stephen Mitchell. Academy of American Poets.

Summary

The speaker tries to explain the essential nature of a black cat. First, he states what a cat is not like (Lines 1-2). It is not like a ghost, because with a ghost, a person feels that he has come up against something, even though it cannot actually be seen, and the encounter creates a kind of reverberation. Instead, when a person stares at a cat, it makes no impression on the animal (Lines 3-4). In a sense, nothing happens. It is as if the cat takes the gaze into itself but is completely unaffected by it. The gaze does not touch the cat; it does not penetrate its being. The speaker emphasizes the thick black coat of the animal.

In the second stanza, the speaker further explains the phenomenon of absorption. It is like a highly agitated man confined in an asylum; nothing can soothe him, except when he bangs on the wall, yelling. Something about the “padded wall” absorbs his inchoate rage, and his mind eases. He is in a sense evaporating. He has run into something that absorbs him. He has no effect on the wall, but his fury enters it and abates. The padded wall is thus like the cat.

In Stanza 3, the speaker reveals a still deeper understanding of the cat. The looks it has absorbed from others over the course of her life have not in fact disappeared; she retains all those glances and gazes. They still exist in the hidden recesses of her being. She can look at them whenever she wishes, but not in a friendly way. Even when she sleeps, they remain with her (Line 12).

In Stanza 4, the situation reverses. The cat becomes active. Instead of someone looking at a cat, the speaker imagines the cat turning her glance onto the person who is looking at her (Line 13). Then the person unexpectedly sees a minute image of himself in the amber eye of the cat and he compares that image to that of an extinct fly, preserved in amber (Lines 14-16).