Mr. Mistoffelees

Mr. Mistoffelees’s skills lie in hiding forks, chasing corks, and making fish-paste disappear. On the surface there is nothing fantastical about these activities, yet the speaker presents them to the reader as wonderful and awe-inspiring. This highlights the poem’s key theme of finding delight in the ordinary. One doesn’t need marvelous magic to be transported and moved; the illusory magic of the real, living world is enough. To be able to appreciate the beauty in nature, cats, and even average, household objects, one must possess the capacity for wonder—like most children do. Children find the ordinary delightful because each object and experience is new to them; the poem indirectly suggests if grown-ups can also find that newness in the world around them, they’d be able to see its many wonders.

In Eliot’s works, poems are seldom set in overtly beautiful settings. To the contrary, the settings are either indeterminate landscapes, a cityscape, or anonymous homes like the family residence of Mr. Mistoffelees. These deliberately mundane and often nameless settings demonstrate how a city pet can be as wonderful as any exotic animal, and the interior of a house or the enclosed space of a garden as lush with possibility as any romantic vista.