Cats and praise

Believe it or not, I actually wasn't at Starbucks to analyze Rapunzel. Instead, I was analyzing a lunatic's cat named Jeoffrey.

Christopher Smart was a seventeenth-century poet who got committed to Bedlam for praying loudly in public and making other people pray with him. He had a cat. He was also highly educated and wrote punny and unique poetry. (Some, like our poetry text, call it free verse; one critical essay I found disagreed heartily. It's more like the Hebrew psalms.) And all he wrote was to and for God.

The essay I'm writing my trialogue on speaks of Smart's poem as an Ars Poetica, like Horace wrote, a poem contemplating poetry. Jeoffrey is just in a segment of this larger poem, the Jubilate Agno. My author, Ennis, argues that Jeoffrey is a symbol of poetry itself.

At first I thought Ennis was wacky. But then I read his article and got really excited. I think it works. And then I realized that not only was Ennis right, but that he connects Smart to other things I've been thinking about, like the different levels of interpretation--literal, allegorical, spiritual (to oversimplify somewhat). And he relates to the utter and astonishing unity of all things under God--Jeoffrey is a mere cat, but he is a creature of God. And language is also a thing from God.

And in this world connected under God, Jeoffrey can serve as a sign--not in spite of being a cat, but because he is so completely a real, furry, clawed cat: true cat of True Cat, full of Thomistic quiddity. And Jeoffrey is "a mixture of gravity and waggery," a combination of the Sublime for which we have no words and the funny thing too humble for serious poetry, just like the Word which was made flesh and dwelt among us.

Language was give us for praise, and motion was given Jeoffrey for praise, so let us all praise the Lamb. Jubilate Agno.

This is going to be a cool trialogue. If ever I become mad, Lord, let me be mad like Christopher Smart!