What poets find in cats is the opposite of what they find in dogs. A dog is loyalty made visible; a cat is mystery made domestic. The cat is the household animal that is also a small oracle — an inscrutable companion who pads through the kitchen and the universe at the same time. When a poem wants to describe attention without sentiment, or solitude without complaint, the cat shows up. When a poem wants a creature that is comfortable being itself in a way humans cannot quite manage, the cat is on the windowsill again.
The poems collected here run from Smart's mad ecstatic praise to Eliot's playful Old Possum verses, from quiet Japanese haiku on cat-and-moon to modern elegies for a beloved pet. Whether you're mourning, smiling, or just looking for a poem that captures the way a cat regards a fly on the wall, you'll find it here.
The Reader's Atlas · Chapter The given world
Poems About Catin the open canon
You're probably here for one of three reasons: a beloved cat has just died and you need a poem for the grief, you're writing about your own cat and looking for inspiration, or you've stumbled into the strange truth that the cat is one of poetry's patron animals. T.S. Eliot built an entire book of light verse around…
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§01 Opening
On cat
A reader's preface to the theme — what to listen for as you move through the poems below.
§04 Reader's questions
On cat, frequently asked
Answer
Christopher Smart's **"For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry"** (from *Jubilate Agno*, 1759) is widely considered the greatest cat poem in English. T.S. Eliot's **"The Naming of Cats"** from *Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats* (1939) is the most quoted, especially since the musical *Cats*.
Answer
Many readers turn to **Christina Rossetti's "On the Death of a Cat"** — short, formal, and openly mournful in a way that lets the grief breathe. For something gentler, Edward Thomas's **"A Cat"** is a brief portrait that ends in quiet acceptance.
Answer
Yes — **"The Cat and the Moon"** is one of his late, dreamlike short lyrics. The cat is named Minnaloushe, and the poem links the cat's pupils to the phases of the moon. It's short, strange, and absolutely characteristic of late Yeats.
Answer
*Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats* (1939) is a collection of light-verse poems about cats — Macavity the Mystery Cat, the Naming of Cats, the Old Gumbie Cat, and so on. Andrew Lloyd Webber adapted these into the musical *Cats*, but the poems on the page are wittier and stranger than the show suggests.
Answer
Many. Issa wrote dozens of haiku about cats — strays, kittens, sleeping cats by the brazier — and the form's love of small attentive moments suits the animal perfectly. Bashō's spring-cat haiku (a yowling cat in mating season) is one of the genre's most famous.
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An anonymous ninth-century Irish monk wrote **"Pangur Bán"** in the margins of a manuscript at Reichenau — a quiet, charming meditation comparing his scholarly work to his cat's mouse-hunting. It's one of the earliest surviving cat poems in any European language.
Answer
Christopher Smart, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Edward Thomas, Christina Rossetti, and Issa are the names you'll see most often. Modern readers might add Marge Piercy and Mary Oliver, both of whom have cat poems alongside their better-known dog poems.