Cats - Analysis

A domestic animal that flatters two kinds of human pride

Baudelaire’s cats aren’t just pets; they are an ideal self-portrait for people who want to believe their stillness is a form of superiority. From the first lines, the poem pairs ardent lovers with austere scholars, two temperaments that seem opposed, and claims they love equally the same creature: the strong and gentle housecat, pride of the house. The cats are described in terms that could fit either group—sedentary, sensitive to cold—as if the animal legitimizes the human wish to withdraw, to stay inside, to be warm, and still feel intense.

The tone here is admiring and slightly conspiratorial: these are insiders who can understand the cat’s true charm. The cat becomes a badge shared by desire and intellect—two forms of appetite that like to imagine themselves refined.

Silence, darkness, and the taste for controlled danger

The poem quickly deepens that cozy admiration into something more nocturnal. These cats are friends of learning and sensual pleasure, but what they seek is not daylight companionship; it’s the silence and the horror of darkness. That phrase holds a key tension: the cats are “gentle,” yet they prefer what is frightening. Baudelaire makes darkness feel less like mere absence of light and more like a chosen habitat—an atmosphere where temptation, secrecy, and private rituals thrive.

This is also where the poem’s praise becomes edged with unease. The cat is not “innocent”; it is allied with both the library and the bedroom, and it wants a world hushed enough for thoughts and urges to grow louder.

Erebus and the cat’s refusal of ownership

The mythic name Erebus (a personification of underworld darkness) suddenly enlarges the poem’s scale. Baudelaire imagines that Erebus would have used cats as gloomy or funereal steeds—a startling image that turns the household animal into something fit to pull death’s carriage. But the fantasy breaks on a single, stubborn fact: their pride would not stoop to bondage.

That refusal is the poem’s moral center. The cat is associated with darkness, even with the underworld, yet it cannot be mastered—not by a god of night, and by implication not by any owner. Baudelaire’s admiration is therefore not just for beauty but for an aristocratic independence: the animal’s elegance is inseparable from its unwillingness to be used.

The sphinx: the cat becomes an oracle of stillness

In the dream passage, the poem’s mood turns from infernal to monumental. When the cats dream, they take the noble attitudes of mighty sphinxes stretched out in solitude, apparently sunk in an endless sleep. The cat’s indolence is no longer just laziness; it is reimagined as the sphinx’s ancient calm—an existence beyond urgency.

Yet the sphinx is not merely decorative. It is a riddle-keeper, a guardian of threshold knowledge. By likening dreaming cats to sphinxes in a desolate landscape, Baudelaire suggests that their stillness hides a secret intelligence—one that does not explain itself, does not perform for humans, and does not need to.

Sparks in the loins, gold in the eyes: erotic mysticism

The poem ends by revealing what the stillness contains. The cats’ fertile loins are full of magic sparks, and their eyes carry particles of gold that spangle dimly like fine grains of sand. This is a deliberately charged pairing: sexuality (loins, fertile) is fused with the language of the occult (magic, mystic). The cats are calm on the surface, but inside them is a kind of electrical weather, a concealed heat.

Those gold flecks also echo the desert image around the sphinx: sand appears again, now transmuted into light inside the pupil. The poem implies that what looks like mere animal gaze is actually a miniature cosmos—dim, granular, and precious—one that invites projection while never fully yielding its meaning.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If the cat is loved by both scholar and lover, is it because it harmonizes those lives—or because it excuses them? The poem keeps praising withdrawal—silence, darkness, sedentary ease—while insisting on inner intensity: sparks, magic, gold-lit eyes. Baudelaire’s cat tempts the reader to believe that doing less can still count as living more, provided the inner life feels bright enough.