Folks, Little Cat is in a bit of a rut. There’s only so many times you can run away from Human-Mom and scare the living hell out of her. Or sit on her shoulder and lean out over whatever she’s trying to see. Everything gets old. Even the classics show their age eventually.
The other day day when Little Cat was feeling a bit ho-hum, Middle Cat (who has always been the historian of the three) pointed out something interesting. Between Milton and Wordsworth, there were no famous sonnetteers. In English, anyway. Those fourteen lines of interlocking rhymes held little appeal for the poets of the 18th century. But that classic came back into fashion. So maybe scaring and irritating Human-Mom will, too. Paws crossed.
Big Cat meowed really loudly into Human-Mom’s ear while she was trying to sleep that Charlotte Smith wrote sonnets in the mid-to-late-1700s. But she’s a woman. So who’s counting, right? Actually, this poem remains a staple of the genre to this day:
Sonnet: On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic
Is there a solitary wretch who hies
To the tall cliff, with starting pace or slow,
And, measuring, views with wild and hollow eyes
Its distance from the waves that chide below;
Who, as the sea-born gale with frequent sighs
Chills his cold bed upon the mountain turf,
With hoarse, half-uttered lamentation, lies
Murmuring responses to the dashing surf?
In moody sadness, on the giddy brink,
I see him more with envy than with fear;
He has no nice felicities that shrink
From giant horrors; wildly wandering here,
He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know
The depth or the duration of his woe.
Charlotte Smith
At this point, Human-Mom had woken up and was asking Big Cat to stop yowling so loudly. But Big Cat knows that Human-Mom loves poetry. And she is especially interested in women-poets. It’s not his fault she doesn’t speak Cat. It’s a really easy language to learn, except for the case-system. And every language has one difficulty, right?
Cinematography by Erika Grumet.
Executive Producer: Middle Cat.
Big Cat: Frob
Little Cat: Widget
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So. A query for our readers: Had you heard of Charlotte Smith? Have you read her poems (or, more unlikely, her novels)? What are some other poets whose gender or other characteristics kept them from having a larger footprint in the public eye? We have some favorites, of course–Margaret Cavendish, Diane DiPrima.
It’s impossible to say how to fix the imbalance. But let’s just keep reading out of our comfort zone and trust that All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.
