Black Cat

Mitchell’s translation of the poem consists of four four-line stanzas. Rilke’s original poem comprises two four-line stanzas, followed by one stanza of 10 lines. In that respect, then, Mitchell has made the form of the poem more traditional, while reducing the number of lines.

Rilke’s poem in German consistently employs end rhymes. In the first two stanzas, the last word in the stanza’s first line rhymes with the last word in the third line, and the same applies to the second and fourth line. In the remaining 10 lines, the rhyme scheme becomes less regular. In his translation, Mitchell attempts to keep the same rhyme scheme, which can be referred to as abab, throughout. However, he can only do this by using imperfect rhymes (also known as near rhymes, partial rhymes, or slant rhymes). Thus in Stanza 1, the vowel sound in “place” at the end of Line 1 rhymes with the same vowel sound, but not the consonant, in Line 3’s “gaze.” In Line 6, “night” is rhymed with “pacified” in Line 8 only in terms of the long “i” sound. In Stanza 3, “audience” in Line 10 is imperfectly rhymed with Line 12’s “once.” In contrast, in perfect rhyme the last stressed vowel of a line and all the sounds that follow it are rhymed. In Rilke’s original, for example, the German word “Stelle” (place) at the end of Line 1 rhymes with “Felle” (fur) at the end of Line 3. It would, however, be a very difficult task to select perfect rhymes in English and still keep close to Rilke’s meaning.

In terms of meter, the poem has fairly even line lengths of mostly 10-12 syllables, or five to six poetic feet. The meter is iambic (a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable), with quite a number of variations. In Line 2, “echoing” is a dactylic foot, consisting of one heavily stressed syllable followed by two lightly stressed ones. The dactyl perfectly captures the fading-away meaning of “echoing.” In Line 3, “black pelt” is not an iamb but a spondee (two strongly stressed syllables), which with the preceding word “thick” effectively places the emphasis on the blackness of the cat. “Dark night” in Line 6 is also a spondee. Inversion of the first foot, to create a trochee rather than an iamb, is a common device and appears in Line 7 with “howling.” The inversion stands out against the metrical base, serving to emphasize the extreme distress of the madman.

Mitchell’s version also includes run-on lines, where a clause or unit of meaning is not complete at the end of a line but continues into the next one. This is also known as enjambment. In Stanza 3, the second part of the last line, “But all at once,” is a run-on line; the meaning does not become apparent until the next line. This is in contrast to what are known as end-stopped lines, in which the syntactic unit or meaning is complete at the end of the line: “as if awakened, she turns her face to yours” (Line 13). Another example of a run-on line is “but here,” which ends Line 2.