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Bread and Circuses

Chapter 14: THE GINGER CAT
By Helen Parry Eden
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Poetry

About This Book

A lyrical collection of short poems ranges from quiet country scenes and childhood memories to urban sketches and religious reflections. The poet renders streams, gardens, market sellers, and domestic interiors in close sensory detail while pairing everyday observation with moral and spiritual meditation. Animal vignettes and playful pieces for children sit alongside elegies, prayers, and ironic portraits of modern life, producing tones of humour, tenderness, and solemnity. Varied forms and concise portraits move between pastoral lanes, London streets, and intimate household moments while attending to time, sorrow, and faith.

THE GINGER CAT

’Tis the old wife at Rickling, she Has lost her ginger cat, ’twas he Who used to share the Master’s tea Beside the settle, Or on his corduroy-clad knee Out-purr the kettle;
Who followed when she pinned a-row Her flapping gowns of indigo And watched the apple-petals blow, With stealthy rapture Rehearsing in a mimic show Some mouse’s capture.
At dew-fall, with uncovered head, What tidings have the old wife led Hither where oak and hazel shed Their shadow deeper? —They say the ginger cat is dead, Shot by the Keeper.
Through coverts dim her searches lie (Howe’er so hardly sorrows try The burden of uncertainty To bear were harder) To where things dangle when they die— The Keeper’s larder.
A bough the larder hangs upon— Rats, and decaying hedge-hogs grown Shapeless, and owls their features gone,— A grisly freight, And many a weasel skeleton With hairless pate,
And trophy of cats’ tails arrayed, Tabby and white and black displayed, The adornment of the still green glade— More gay for that Of him who in the morning strayed, The ginger cat.
She knows it, and she cuts it down; Then warm beneath her folded gown Bestows the severed brush’s brown And orange bands— So soft of fur, the tears fall down Upon her hands.
The copse-wood parts, ’tis she who goes, Whom shades obscure and star-light shows, Treading between the hazel rows The fallen sticks, Home, where the careless fire-light glows Along the bricks.