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Summary, themes, line-by-line analysis, poetic devices, form, meter, rhyme scheme, and more. Full definitions of each term with color-coded examples, followed by additional resources. The full play, poem, or sonnet alongside the modern English translation mapped by colors.
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Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" is a classic children's poem, originally published in Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets (1871). Its heroes, an owl and a cat, fall madly in love and sail off to be married together.
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat. Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1871. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. Download PDF.
- Summary of The Owl and The Pussy-Cat
- Structure of The Poem
- Poetic Techniques
- Analysis of The Owl and The Pussy-Cat
This nonsense poem starts with the boat journey of the two main characters named in the title. They profess their love to one another and decide to get married. They need to find a ring and their search takes them to a pig. That pig sells them its nose ring for one shilling and they get married. After that, there is much celebrating and the poem en...
‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ by Edward Lear is a three-stanza poem that’s divided into sets of eleven lines. These lines follow a rhyme scheme of ABCBDEDEEEE, shifting slightly in the second and third stanzas. Lear also makes use of half-rhyme and internal rhyme. Half rhyme, also known as slant or partial rhyme,is seen through the repetition of asso...
Lear makes use of several poetic techniques in ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’. These include alliteration, symbolism, metaphor, and enjambment. The first, alliteration, occurs when words are used in succession, or at least appear close together, and begin with the same letter.Alliteration has the ability to increase the musicality of lines. This is so...
Stanza One
In the first stanza of ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ the speaker describes the actions and adventures of an owl and a pussy-cat. The two travel out to sea in a “beautiful pea-green boat,” a symbolfor their happiness together. They took everything they needed with them, “honey, and plenty of money”. The internal rhyme in these lines is quite effective. It is employed numerous times throughout the text. The personification of these animals is not addressed, instead, it is taken as natural that th...
Stanza Two
In the second stanza of The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, the cat responds just as complimentarily to the owl. The cat calls the owl an “elegant fowl” and declares that they should stop wasting time and be married. Next, there is the question of the ring and where they’re going to get one. In their search, they sailed for an extended period of time. Finally, they got to an even more fantastical world in which there were “Bong-Tree[s]” and a pig that had a ring at the end of his nose. The phrase “nos...
Stanza Three
In the last lines of ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ the owl asks the pig to sell the couple the ring in its nose for “one shilling”. The pig immediately agrees and the couple got married. They celebrated afterward with a big meal, each getting something they wanted. They used a “runcible spoon”. Today, the word “runcible” is used to refer to a spork but when it was coined by Lear he did not give it a specific definition and often used the adjective in different ways. In the last lines, Lear retu...
One of the most delightful and best-known poems in praise of a house cat, Christopher Smart’s “My Cat, Jeoffry” is actually one section of a much more complex and difficult work entitled...
"Fog" is a very short poem by the American poet Carl Sandburg, published in 1916 in Sandburg's first major poetry collection, Chicago Poems. In the poem, fog appears, settles over an unnamed city and harbor, and then simply disappears. The speaker compares this fog to a cat, saying that it has "little cat feet" and sits on its "silent haunches."
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Summary. ‘Macavity: The Mystery Cat’ by T. S. Eliot describes the evil untraceable deeds of a ginger cat named Macavity, an embodiment of the fictional character Professor Moriarty.
