Maybe
God is a Cat
Maybe God is a Cat –
Sharpening her claws on planets,
Pouncing
from star to star
Unraveling
our lives like yarn.
We
scatter as mice in the barn,
Our
hearts pitter-patter –
But
there is nowhere to hide
If God
is a celestial cat like that:
A
feline God of War
Brighter
than Blake’s Tyger
Who
knows what fangs are for
And
never leaves survivors.
Of the Poem (A Brief Overview):
Stanza I
Maybe God is a Cat –
Sharpening her claws on planets,
Pouncing from star to star
Unraveling our lives like yarn.
Daniel Klawitter, a Colorado poet who I've come to respect, offers us an interesting prelude to his poem- it is from a quote by Paul Davies, from
The Fifth Miracle:
“In 1911, the little town of Nakhla in Egypt was the scene of one of
the most remarkable events in history: a chunk of rock (later
discovered to be a piece of the planet Mars) fell from the sky and
killed a dog, the only known canine fatality caused by a cosmic
object.”
And so one chidefully wonders: perhaps God is a Cat?
The
first stanza of his poem opens up with an innocent hypothetical: perhaps God is a
Cat? and then dedicates itself to the interstellar playfulness of this
Creature.
It is interesting to note that the word God usually carries with it a
masculine import. But one notices that in this poem the Cat is referred to as her
in the second line. Truth be told, without realizing it, as I read the poem I
subconsciously thought of the Cat as female the entire time, but hadn't connected the idea of God with it.
And so the poem begins ... contemplating the possibility of God as being a Cat- and not just the possibility of God being a Cat, but God as a Female Cat!
Stanza II
We
scatter as mice in the barn,
Our
hearts pitter-patter –
But
there is nowhere to hide
If
God is a celestial cat like that:
The
second stanza dedicates itself to our finite, limited nature by comparing our
lives to mice scattered throughout a barn (a metaphor I'm sure for earth, or for existence in general).
If God is a Cat, and we are the mice, where could we possibly hide? It would seem
that there would be nowhere to take refuge considering the omniscience of such
a Predatory Being- a Being that claws on planets as playthings, and toys with our lives as if it were a game, pouncing from star to star.
In fact, is that not where the pitter-patter of our hearts comes from? - a sort of existential anxiety based on the reality that we cannot flee from this Presence?
Stanza III
A feline God of War
Brighter
than Blake’s Tyger
Who
knows what fangs are for
And
never leaves survivors.
And
make no mistakes ... there are no competitors with our poet’s Cat. Not even
Blake's dreaded Tyger (that devilish and forged and finite thing) could
ever contend with the warful and predatory fangs of such a Divine Feline.
Poetic Devices and Structure
The
first stanza is somewhat similar to a ballad, i.e. traditional verse
having a particular rhyme scheme that is coupled with a fixed meter, and
is usually in the form of a quatrain. The ballad, and there are many kind, is structured so well and is so conducive of rhythm that they were
used on a large scale to compose music. Our poet seems to mimic the
ballad structure here, but leaves the rhyme scheme out, and quite
deliberately so it seems.
The
meter of this particular stanza is quite simple: the first and third
lines consists of 6 syllables, or what in poetry is also known as a trimeter; the second and fourth lines contain 8 syllables- again, what
in poetry is known as a tetrameter.
There
are also a couple other devices that are used in this stanza that are
worth mentioning: repetition and alliteration. The repetition occurs in
line three where our poet’s cat pounces from ‘star to star'. The
alliteration occurs with the ‘our lives like yarn’ phrase in line four.
The alliterative aspect is very pronounced, especially when said out
loud (our lives like), and seems to roll off the tongue with a slightly
rigid though harmonious euphony.
The
second stanza drops the ballad structure altogether and embraces a
musical pattern that arises from a deliberate use of assonance,
alliteration, and internal rhymes. But before this happens, our poet
links the first and second stanzas together by the last word of the last
line of the first stanza (yarn), and the last word of the first line of
the second stanza (barn). What I like is how obvious the link is
between the two stanzas, especially considering that each of the lines
have an 8 syllable count- you can almost read them back to back:
Unraveling our lives like yarn
We scatter as mice in the barn
The
second line of the second stanza is an interesting combination of
assonance and alliteration. The assonance arises with the words ‘our
hearts’. The harmonic resonance lent by those two words are indeed tacit
at first sight, but it is there. It is where the utterance of the first
word ‘our’ corresponds to the sound that follows the ‘h’ in the word
‘heart’ (our hearts). When you read these words with the words
‘pitter-patter’ (where the alliteration occurs) there is a melodious
pattern that arises and continues on through the rest of the stanza via internal rhymes.
The
rhythmic tone that occurs in the following lines- lines three and four
of the second stanza- are obvious, and contribute to the musical aspect
of the overall stanza that was begun by the use of assonance and
alliteration. The lines flow beautifully from the previous ones by the
way that our poet employs the internal rhymes of line three (there is
nowhere) with those that close the stanza in line four, ‘a celestial cat
like that’. It is this broad spectrum combination of assonance,
alliteration, and internal rhymes that make the second stanza read so
gorgeously, and musically:
Our hearts pitter-patter – (6)
But there is nowhere to hide (7)
If God is a celestial cat like that: (11)
The
final stanza culminates in a collection of homogenous end rhymes that
are all curiously verging on oblique. Oblique rhymes are rhymes whose
words lack an exact sonorous correspondence, having sounds that are
slightly different, but are nevertheless convergent. The words war and tyger, for example, do not share a direct rhyming pattern with each
other, but it is undeniable that there is a rhythmic affinity shared by
the two that make us perceive them as a rhyme, however obliquely that
rhyme might seem. (One could argue that the end rhymes of lines one and
three- war and for- were meant to be direct rhymes, but I personally do
not believe that it was the poet’s deliberate intention in this stanza
to have lines one and three rhyme, while the other lines remain
oblique.)
Again, our poet uses alliteration in lines two and three to thread the stanza together.
Brighter than Blake’s Tyger
Who knows what fangs are for
This
time, however, he goes a step further. He creates an alliteration in
line two that connects itself to the end rhymes of the stanza so that it
works much the same way that an internal rhyme would work, contributing
to the harmony of the overall stanza: Brighter than Blake’s Tyger. To
get an idea of how these devices work together, and how they contribute
to the stanza's overall harmony, here is what it looks like with the end
rhymes and alliterations together:
A feline God of War
Brighter than Blake’s Tyger
Who knows what fangs are for
And never leaves survivors.
It
is for this reason that I deeply appreciate and read Daniel Klawitter’s
poetry. Far from recklessly throwing his poems together, he invests a
great deal of energy and imagination constructing them, and employs with
great care every device at his disposal to achieve works whose subjects
are expressed through eloquent poetic structures. If you have not read
his works you are no doubt missing out. I highly, highly recommend looking him up. You can find some of his works on Guy Farmer's Poems and Poetry blog, or check out one of his chap books (he has three, his most recent being For the Famished). Let me know what you think.
