Robert Graves: Cat-Goddesses

A perverse habit of cat-goddesses—
Even the blackest of them, black as coals
Save for a new moon blazing on each breast,
With coral tongues and beryl eyes like lamps,
Long-leggèd, pacing three by three in nines—
This obstinate habit is to yield themselves,
In verisimilar love-ecstasies,
To tatter-eared and slinking alley-toms
No less below the common run of cats
Than they above it; which they do for spite,
To provoke jealousy—not the least abashed
By such gross-headed, rabbit-coloured litters
As soon they shall be happy to desert.


Written in the 1950s or early 1960s: a period when Graves was making an utter fool of himself by elevating the young and pretty objects of his successive infatuations to the role of "Muses", to be eventually disillusioned when the object proved herself unmuselike. Perhaps it's unfair to reduce the poem to a mere lashing-out, when its larger subject is the irrepressible animality in humans.