Black Cat

The word “black” occurs repeatedly in the poem as motif, or recurring description. It appears in the title and in Stanza 1, Line 3, in the “thick black pelt” of the cat. In Rilke’s original, the German word for black, “Schwarze,” appears three times, but in Mitchell’s translation, the last occurrence is translated as “dark,” as in “dark night” (Line 6), which conveys the same feeling of blackness.

The emphasis on black is important. As the absence of color or light, it conveys the thematic idea that the blackness of the cat absorbs or cancels out whatever looks others direct at it. The looks contain certain varieties of color, metaphorically speaking, but they cannot endure in the deep interior blackness of the cat. There is just a sense here of the all-enveloping nature of blackness, as a kind of hidden dimension of life that swallows up everything in its vastness. The cat seems to embody it.

If the lack of color in blackness absorbs everything to itself, hiding is another motif in the poem. Reality, the way things actually are, is not obvious and has to be teased out. Sometimes this may be difficult: What reality does a ghost represent, for example? What lies “behind” the ghost, so to speak, is not easy to determine.