Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot

First published: 1939

Subjects: Animals and social issues

Type of work: Poetry

Recommended Ages: 13-18

Form and Content

On the surface, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is a surprising change of pace, coming as it does from one of the most serious and, as some regard him, gloomy poets of the twentieth century: T. S. Eliot, the author of such somber works as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), The Waste Land (1922), and “The Hollow Men” (1925). In sharp contrast, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats seems refreshingly lighthearted and devil-may-care in the sheer energy of its play of both language and imagination. Yet, lurking beneath its surface is the potential of a darker intent, just as the potential of a lighter or at least ironic intent peaks continuously out of the corners and from behind the lines of Eliot’s more sober and serious literary endeavors.

The volume is composed of fourteen poems, none longer than two full pages, composed in a variety of rudimentary stanzaic patterns, ranging from quatrains to stanzas whose varying lengths, like those of prose paragraphs, are determined more by content than any preconceived structural principle. One outstanding prosodic feature is the nearly complete use of couplets, although several of the poems—“The Naming of Cats,” “The Song of the Jellicles,” and “Old Deuteronomy”—employ true quatrains, utilizing an abab rhyme scheme throughout, and “Of the Aweful Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles” uses three-line rhymes.

The poetry saves its true inventiveness for the clever use of language, which at times approaches the sprightliness of nursery rhymes and nonsense verse largely because of the obvious pleasure that Eliot finds in naming his various feline characters. Jennyanydots, Mungojerrie, Rumpelteazer, Bustopher Jones, and Skimbleshanks represent as good a sampling as any. That a cat’s name is significant is stressed in the opening poem of the sequence, “The Naming of Cats,” which includes such delicious sounds as Coricopat and Jellylorum, and which, with the concluding poem, “The Ad-dressing of Cats,” provides a generalizing frame around the twelve poems comprising the main body of the text. These each deal with a very particular, very individualistic sort of cat.

They range from the Old Gumbie Cat, whose ironically nurturing treatment of mice and roaches makes for “well-ordered households,” to Growltiger, a criminal cat whose “last stand” echoes a bit of the burlesqued violence to be found in the Lost Boys, pirates, and Indians of Sir James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904) and in Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928), with its host of underworld characters. Meanwhile, more typical cats such as Rum Tum Tugger either are the model of domestic contrariety or, like Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer, make a shambles of their adoptive household, while other cat characters portrayed in human guises, such as the title roles in “Bustopher Jones: The Cat About Town” and “Gus the Theatre Cat,” are presented as out-and-out cads and general ne’er-do-wells. Added to these bounders are the further criminal exploits of the Great Rumpuscat, who puts the battling Pekes and Pollicles on their ears, and Macavity, a Holmesian “master criminal” “called the Hidden Paw,” suggesting that there is no more intractable creature in all the animal kingdom than the cat.

The hero of “Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat” is a rather winning sort, seeing to it that things go smoothly on all the various mail runs, but the general tone and tenor of the volume impresses primarily two feline features upon readers: that cats do as they please and that their self-possessed swagger is no laughing matter. Thus, the volume’s final poem, “The Ad-dressing of Cats,” which recommends calling a cat by his name, expresses the frustration of trying to come to mutual terms with cats by bringing readers back full circle to the first poem in the volume, “The Naming of Cats,” which had insisted that each cat has a name only “the cat himself knows, and will never confess.” In sum, there is no getting the better of cats, even when one is attempting to be deferential, politic, and cautious.

Critical Context

Taken together, the foregoing suggests that Eliot was as serious about the poetry comprising Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats as he was about any of his other poetry. The fact that hints of the volume’s mood and tone appear in earlier work identified as minor poetry in The Complete Poems and Plays (1969), specifically “Lines to a Persian Cat” and “Lines to a Yorkshire Terrier,” further suggests that the work went through a gestational period during which Eliot was also composing some of his most serious and philosophical poetry that would later comprise Four Quartets (1943), which explores the complex interrelatedness among God, person, and nature in Christian terms.

It cannot be mere happenstance that one of the twentieth century’s most notably Christian poets also focused on an animal as self-absorbed and likely to do as it pleases as the domesticated cat, or that the poet who virtually first gave voice, in The Waste Land, to what critic Hugh Kenner termed the “urban apocalypse” created a cast of primarily city cats. Like all good literature, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats first should delight readers by giving them the pleasure of enjoying words beautifully used. Nevertheless, the amorality and the outright violence and criminal chicanery of these “practical cats” can be viewed as a way of also delightfully instructing readers in the deleterious moral consequences of action centered only and wholly on self and self-aggrandizement.

Bibliography

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