The Blue Bowl

“The Blue Bowl” is a 16-line, single-stanza free verse poem from the perspective of a speaker who has just buried her pet cat. The speaker begins in the first-person plural, establishing the presence of another intimate figure, and she establishes a blunt tone: “Like primitives we buried the cat / with his bowl” (Lines 1-2). With these lines, Kenyon introduces a central theme of the poem: The human desire for ritual and comfort in the face of death, and the ways in which these rituals still fall short. The word “primitive” (Line 1), which suggests something at its most basic level, implies that the speaker is ill-equipped to process the emotion she feels, and is grasping for ways to find meaning in the wake of the cat’s death. She wants to give the cat a good burial, but the tools she has available to perform the burial rites are lacking.

The speaker and her partner include the cat’s bowl in the grave as a ritual, one they enact in the hope of gaining a sense of comfort and closure. By including the cat’s bowl, they mark the end of his life with the inclusion of an important daily object, trying to imbue the object, and thus the cat’s death, with meaning. Together they cover the cat and his bowl with sand and gravel, but the dirt falls “with a hiss / and a thud on his side” (Lines 4-5). Personifying the action of the dirt by making it “hiss” (Line 4) like an angry cat cuts against any suggestion of a peaceful, comforting event. The dirt “thuds” (Line 5) against the cat’s dead body, emphasizing the artlessness of the burial, and echoing the speaker’s inability to say something eloquent and meaningful in the wake of the death.

The speaker proceeds to describe in detail the cat’s physical appearance, dedicating three of the poem’s 16 lines to this description: “his long red fur, the white feathers / that grew between his toes, and his long, / not to say aquiline, nose” (Lines 6-8). The care she takes with the detail, emphasizing a feature so tiny as the texture of the fur that grew between the cat’s toes, demonstrates her attempt to make sense and meaning of the cat’s life, grasping for concrete details in which she can feel grounded. In death, she tries to recreate his life by reconstructing his physical presence and giving him almost human-like detail when she describes his nose as not quite “aquiline” (Line 8). She conveys a sense of beauty and hope in the description. The speaker also prefigures the robin in the final movements of the poem when she describes the cat fur as being like “white feathers” (Line 6). Here, she moves from the more primitive, artless burial with the dirt thudding on the body to a lovelier, more elegiac description of the cat’s appearance, suggesting the possibility of something good that might come out of the cat’s death, even if only in memory.

The speaker and her partner stand and “brush each other off” (Line 9) at this moment, leaving the speaker’s reverie to return to the present as she prepares the reader for the tonal shift that happens in the next line. Kenyon then employs a volta, or a poetic turn that signifies a change in tone, thought, or emotion: “There are sorrows much keener than these” (Line 10). In this moment, the reader begins to understand a more profound depth to the speaker’s grief, extending further than simply the death of the cat, and suggesting another, unspoken loss, one that the speaker is unable or unready to articulate. Not only is the speaker “primitive” (Line 1) in her approach to the burial of the cat, but she is “primitive” in her inability to talk about her larger emotional concerns. The line is end-stopped (completed), like the two that come before it (the only three end-stopped lines in the entire poem), forcing the reader to pause and consider the emotional weight it imparts. By building the lines in this way, Kenyon prepares her reader for the volta, slowing down the pacing of the poem until she reaches the turn, and then returning to the rhythm of the enjambed lines (lines that continue onto the next) in the final third of the poem.

The speaker describes the rest of the day after the burial, how she and her partner remained silent, then “worked, / ate, stared, and slept” (Lines 11-12). The list of basic human needs—working, eating, sleeping—punctuated with the unexpected “staring” (Line 12) recreates the emotional flatness the speaker feels in the wake of her grief. The monosyllabic words emphasize the plodding, going-through-the-motions blankness of the speaker. The day is followed by a night of storm before the speaker switches to the present tense, saying,

now it clears, and a robin

burbles from a dripping bush

like the neighbor who means well

but always says the wrong thing (Lines 13-16).

The change in verb tense alerts the reader that the speaker is trying to move on and change her manner of thinking. While the storm was in keeping with the speaker’s sense of grief, the robin and the dripping water, symbols of life, are incongruent to her. The pastoral imagery of the singing bird, the new life after the storm, initially suggests healing, but Kenyon immediately undercuts this idea by comparing the bird to the neighbor saying the wrong thing. She ends the poem on this note of ambivalence: The speaker can see the natural world that suggests goodness and good intentions, but she herself is not quite ready to leave her grief behind.