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Thursday – Halloween
For Halloween I’m sharing one of the scariest poems that I know. It’s about a childhood nightmare involving a cat that Robert Graves recalled after being wounded at the Battle of the Somme in World War I.
Graves remembers being declared dead after his body was retrieved from “a crater by High Wood” and being loaded on board a train, which is when the dream came back to him. (For years after he was traumatized by trains.) It came back to him again when, in a morphine-induced state (and probably PTSD), his mind returned him to the battlefield.
A Child’s Nightmare
By Robert Graves
Through long nursery nights he stood
By my bed unwearying,
Loomed gigantic, formless, queer,
Purring in my haunted ear
That same hideous nightmare thing,
Talking, as he lapped my blood,
In a voice cruel and flat,
Saying for ever, “Cat!… Cat!… Cat!…”
That one word was all he said,
That one word through all my sleep,
In monotonous mock despair.
Nonsense may be light as air,
But there’s Nonsense that can keep
Horror bristling round the head,
When a voice cruel and flat
Says for ever, “Cat!… Cat!… Cat!…”
He had faded, he was gone
Years ago with Nursery Land,
When he leapt on me again
From the clank of a night train,
Overpowered me foot and head,
Lapped my blood, while on and on
The old voice cruel and flat
Says for ever, “Cat!… Cat!… Cat!…”
Morphia drowsed, again I lay
In a crater by High Wood:
He was there with straddling legs,
Staring eyes as big as eggs,
Purring as he lapped my blood,
His black bulk darkening the day,
With a voice cruel and flat,
“Cat!… Cat!… Cat!… Cat!…” he said, “Cat!… Cat!…”
When I’m shot through heart and head,
And there’s no choice but to die,
The last word I’ll hear, no doubt,
Won’t be “Charge!” or “Bomb them out!”
Nor the stretcher-bearer’s cry,
“Let that body be, he’s dead!”
But a voice cruel and flat
Saying for ever, “Cat!… Cat!… Cat!”
If one were to analyze this dream from a Jungian perspective, one could see the cat as a devouring anima figure, the warrior’s female side which becomes toxic when his male side seeks to suppress all that is effeminate. But no amount of analysis can counter the absolute terror found in the image.
Cat!…Cat!…Cat!
