Close Reading of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke: 'Black Cat' - translated from the German by J. B. Leishman
‘Black Cat’ by Rainer Maria Rilke performs the process of sonderweaving by embodying both the deadly and life-affirming qualities of thoughtsilk, which wraps around the beings that it perceives in ways that can either destroy the reality of the being inside, as a real spider’s cocoon would do, or reveal something of it by being a kin-cocoon – a carefully woven encasement of thought that wraps as closely as it can around the perceived shape of the being as it appears through its myriad of diverse actions without ever actually penetrating into the lived reality of the being itself.
In the first stanza the predominant meter of trochaic pentameter is established as an embodiment of the casually aggressive nature of the reader’s perception positioned as viewer of a ‘Black Cat’. For pentameter is the rhythm closest to a human’s natural way of speaking, and thus it is casual, while the aggressive quality of the reader’s perception positioned as viewer of the ‘Black Cat’ is established in the last two lines of the first stanza through the use of the second person, ‘your’ and the term ‘black fell’, which describes the cat’s physical presence as one of being dead, or a pelt, at the hands of human desire for owning nature as an aesthetic entity.
But while human perception, as embodied by the reader as ‘your’, acts in this deadly way, it is the physical presence of the cat itself that then causes the reader’s objectifying ‘strongest gaze’ to become wrapped in a kin-cocoon of their own making – a ‘padded cell’s absorbency’ designed for ‘a maniac, precipitated/into the surrounding black’. The way the cat’s ‘black fell’ wraps around the ‘gaze’ of the reader here as a ‘padded cell’s absorbency’ embodies how the cat’s perception is actually life-affirming in the way that it ‘evaporate[s]’ the ‘maniac’ - affirming how perception itself is only thoughtsilk that wraps around the being it perceives, leaving an empty space in the mind that shows only the outline, or a kin-cocoon, of what the reality of that being’s lived existence is.
At this point, the pattern of rhythmic endings has achieved an interweaving of feminine endings, or stressless syllable endings, alternating with masculine endings, or stressed syllable endings, where the feminine endings tend to align more strongly with the perception of the reader, and the masculine endings tend to align more strongly with the ‘Black Cat’. For example, the feminine ending line ‘as a maniac, precipitated/’ emphasises the presence of the reader’s ‘gaze’ as the main subject of that line, while the next masculine ending line, ‘into the surrounding black, will be’ emphasises the agency of the cat as the main subject of that line, in that it will ‘dissipate’ this ‘maniac’ through the ‘surrounding black’ that is its pelt. In this way, the poem interweaves threads; lines of poetry, or thoughtsilk, which alternate as being aligned with either the reader positioned as viewer of the ‘Black Cat’ or aligned with the ‘Black Cat’ herself. This action of the poem thus far performs the empathreadic qualities of thought as thoughtsilk; it performs how this thoughtsilk can be used to weave either deadly cocoons, like that woven by the reader positioned as objectifying viewer, or kin-cocoons, like that woven by the ‘Black Cat’ herself around the ‘gaze’ of the reader to prevent them from doing harm to themselves and others through their status as a ‘maniac’, or someone who objectifies other beings.
In the final stanza, however, this established distinction between the feminine ending as aligned with the reader and the masculine ending as aligned with the cat becomes complicated by the line break that emphasises the agency of the ‘Black Cat’ when ‘All the glances she was ever swept with/on herself she seems to be concealing’. Here the line break before ‘on herself she seems to be concealing’ renders the cat as the subject who actively keeps ‘glances’ concealed ‘on herself’ like weapons. Thus, even though the line is referring denotatively to objectifying ‘glances’ made by the reader, it is poetically referring to the cat as an active agent who ‘seems’ to have intentionally collected the ‘glances’ of the reader and concealed them on her person. Through this process then, the poet sonderweaves between the perspective of the cat and the reader in such a way as to perform how the cat’s sonderweaving begins to overpower the objectifying ‘gaze’ of the reader positioned as viewer, in that the established association of the feminine ending with the reader’s perspective is transformed, like a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly, into an association of the feminine ending with the cat with the line ‘on herself she seems to be concealing’. Here the empathreadic qualities of perception are emphasised through the verb ‘swept’ – for sweeping gestures are the gesture of the spider thread as it is cast across the gaping emptiness of space. Here though, the ‘Black Cat’ herself becomes the empty space across which thoughtsilks have been ‘swept’ in their attempts to co-weave a world with her.
The line ‘As if awakened, though, she turns her face/full upon your own quite suddenly’, then implies that the Black Cat’s face acts like the moon – reflects light and illuminates the world in such a way that a cat can perceive it more sharply than a human. This idea of the cat’s perception being more powerful than the human’s is also performed on the level of rhythm, as the predominant trochaic pentameter of the poem slides back into an iambic lilt with the line ‘As if wakened, though, she turns her face’. Here, the rhythmic disruption performs a starling moment of reversal; a startling feeling of being looked back at by a being that you previously objectified, performing the slow, lacking, unreadiness of perception that the reader is positioned to feel. The following line, ‘full upon your own quite suddenly’ is then also lacking a stressed syllable, to emphasise in the reader that they are always alone in their perception in that they are lacking the reality of the other, and this is felt as a fearful moment of existential crisis – rather like realising that you are wrapped in a deadly cocoon of your own making. The following two lines then repeat this pattern of a predominantly iambic line, ‘and in the yellow amber of those sealing eyes’ followed by a trochaic line that is lacking a stressed syllable ‘eyes of hers you unexpectedly’, which performs how the gaze of the ‘Black Cat’ is beginning to sonderweave with the ‘gaze’ of the reader positioned as viewer of her; the iambic turn embodying the gaze of the Black Cat as other, and the trochaic line lacking a stressed syllable embodying how the reader positioned as viewer is realising, through the sonderweaving of the Black Cat’s gaze, that their perception is lacking the property of reality and always has – that their ‘gaze’ is not an embodiment of reality but a co-coon; a cocoon co-weaved by the viewer and the viewed that forms an encasement of the shape of the viewed being’s reality that is empty on the inside – lacking material reality. This repeated rhythmic pattern therefore performs how the reader positioned as viewer is becoming more deeply wrapped in the empathreadic qualities of the Black Cat’s perception, as the iambic line reflects a loss of forward pushing movement, which is replaced by a more reflective, backwards pointing motion, which embodies the ‘Black Cat’.
The line break after ‘sealing’ then performs the action of sealing the line shut, which also forces the verb ‘sealing’ to vaguely perform as a noun. This performs the empathreadic quality of perception by revealing how movement, both physical and intellectual can also be a kind of matter that constricts our perception if not used carefully; if not woven delicately into the shape of the beings of which we are trying to gain an impression and understanding.
The assonance of the long ‘o’ sound in ‘yellow amber of those’ then also performs how a cat’s pupil narrows into a thin line down through the ‘yellow amber’ of their iris, as the mouth, in a rounded shape like a dilated pupil, must physically narrow to form the sound. This performance occurs precisely at the moment when the rhythm becomes fainter through an anapest found within ‘amber of those’, which creates the sensation within the reader of being physically constricted within the narrowing pupil of the ‘Black Cat’ and made to feel a sense of faintness, as though they are being wound like a mummy or insect in the thoughtsilk of this ‘Black Cat’.
When the word ‘insect’ then combines with the image of being ‘enshrined […] like […] some vanished race’ to weave a picture of an insect cocooned in the web of a spider, just like a dead body is left cocooned by the ancient Egyptian people in the form of a mummy, the poem finally performs how the objectifying ‘gaze’ or ‘glances’ of a human are stored forever in the sonderweb; how in the woven, material reality of perceptions, those harmful ‘glances’ or cocoons that they wrap around the beings they perceive are then also wrapped, or kin-cocooned by creatures like the ‘Black Cat’; ‘enshrined there/ like an insect of some vanished race’. Cognitive dissonance is thus created here by the description of an ‘insect’ being part ‘of some vanished race’, which evaporates the distinction between animal and human and positions this evaporating kind of ‘gaze’ itself as something that is both a sacred object to be ‘enshrined’ and an object that enshrines the world into various pieces to be perceived via the thoughtsilk that renders them visible at all.
By Claire - z3393668.
Reference List
Cat Poems: by the World’s Greatest Poets. Serpent’s Tail, 2018.