Ode on the death of a favourite cat

'Horace Walpole's Cat' by Christopher Frayling

The inimitable Boris (2004-2020).

While clearing the office the other day, I came across my copy of Horace Walpole's Cat by Christopher Frayling, which is a very elegantly written, very entertaining, read. For those who don't know the story, some time in 1747, poor Selima the cat, who lived with Horace Walpole at his home in Arlington Street (this was before he moved to his gothic mansion, Strawberry Hill), got up on the rim of a large Chinese porcelain tub containing goldfish, fell in, and drowned.

Walpole was, understandably, upset and wrote to his close friend, the poet Thomas Gray, asking if he would compose some sort of epitaph for the unfortunate creature. Gray replied saying that he couldn't begin to grieve properly until he knew which cat Walpole was referring to (his other cat was called either Zara, after the heroine of Voltaire's The Tragedy of Zara, or Zama, nobody seems sure which). Once the identity of the cat had been cleared up, Gray enclosed the first draft of the poem that would become Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat (linked below). ‘There's a poem for you,’ said Gray, ‘it is rather too long for an epitaph’.

Apart from Frayling's expert biographical slant on the poem and his analysis of it in terms of 18th-century culture, another joy of Horace Walpole's Cat are the huge reproductions of Richard Bentley's wonderful engravings. There's a full reprint of Bentley's explanation of his Frontispiece which is just as much of a mock-heroic masterpiece as the poem itself. Witness ‘the cat standing on the brim of the tub ... Two cariatides of a river god stopping his ears to her cries, and Destiny cutting the nine threads of life ... At the bottom are mice enjoying themselves on the prospect of the cat's death; a lyre and a pallet’. Fantastic stuff.

You can read the whole poem on the Poetry Foundation website »

And on the subject of losing a cat, you can read my ‘in memoriam’ post for our beloved cat, Boris, here »