Last year, people told me that they liked the poetry on the challenge list and asked for more so I’ve tried to incorporate a little bit more and not keep it isolated to the early Gothic! This is our last poem on the list ‘A Child’s Nightmare’ by prolific poet and author Robert Graves, who is possibly most well known for his book I, Claudius. The poem is short and haunting and you can read it here.
To the left is a photo of Robert Graves with cats which is, I have to admit, somewhat inapposite for today’s poem. The cat-like creature that haunts the child in his bed and the man he becomes on the battlefields of the first world war is far more terrifying. A ‘hideous nightmare thing’, ‘gigantic, formless, queer’ which laps his blood while simply repeating over and again ‘cat, cat, cat’. There is something incredibly eerie about that simple repetition. What this nightmare creature is is less clear and I’d love to hear people’s interpretations.
Perhaps, or even probably, there is no link but it reminds me of one of Robert Graves most famous quotes, namely that: ‘Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.’ In other words, his prose writings were written in service to his passion for poetry (here represented by the ‘cat’). It might well be an entirely unconnected use of cat imagery but there is something evocative about bringing the two together. The monstrous lapping crushing thing, voice cruel and flat, repeating without ceasing ‘cat’ as the urge to create, as the poetic muse or poetry itself is a possible layer of meaning which I find haunting.
Romancing the Gothic 