Edward Thomas gives his cat no sentimental treatment. In twelve plain lines he describes a creature who is named but not loved, owned but not cared for. He then lets us watch the speaker's feelings harden into hatred and, in the final line, shift in a way he doesn't explain.
The first stanza is a small study in neglect. "She had a name among the children; / But no one loved though someone owned / Her". The enjambment pushes "Her" onto the next line, so the cat arrives last, almost an afterthought in her own story. The vague "someone" matters too: nobody in the household is willing to be named as responsible. Then comes the routine. She is "locked out of doors at bedtime", and her kittens are "duly drowned". The adverb is chilling because it belongs to paperwork and chores, as if drowning kittens were an item to be ticked off. The rhyme of "owned" with "drowned" ties possession to killing with a neatness that feels deliberate.
The second stanza turns on "nevertheless". Whatever was done to her, the cat stays a hunter, and the season is Spring, when birdsong is at its height. Thomas builds a list, "blackbirds, thrushes, nightingales", and then lets the next line swell: "And birds of bright voice and plume and flight". It is the longest line in the poem, and the repeated "and" slows it into something close to song. The last line drops abruptly: "As well as scraps from neighbours' pails." The same mouth takes the nightingale and the kitchen waste. The rhyme makes the point sharper still, since "nightingales", the most poetic of birds, is chained by sound to "pails".
Only in the third stanza does the speaker say "I". The confession is blunt: "I loathed and hated her for this". The doubled verbs have no subtlety, and the poem doesn't apologise for them. The hatred is then justified by a single, exact image: "One speckle on a thrush's breast / Was worth a million such". The speckle is tiny, the kind of detail only a patient observer notices, and it is weighed against a whole species of cats. The poem makes a quiet point about where the speaker's love lies: it lies in attention to small, fragile beauty.
Then the poem stalls on "and yet", the pause hanging in the middle of the line. What follows is not the excuse we might expect, not "but I pitied her" or "but she was only following her nature". It is simply: "She lived long, till God gave her rest." One reading is bitter irony, since the killer is not punished and the world lets her live. Another, which the poem's tone seems to me to allow, is a grudging gentleness. "Rest" is what we wish for the weary, and the word suggests the speaker, for all his loathing, grants her a peaceful end. The rhyme of "rest" with "breast" binds the cat's ending to the bird's body, as if the two can't be fully separated.
The form suits this restraint. The ABCB quatrains, rhyming only on the second and fourth lines, have a ballad's simplicity, and the rhymes are full and unshowy. The lines run loosely around eight syllables, mostly in one-syllable words, so the poem sounds like someone telling a story rather than composing one. That plainness gives the drowned kittens and the eaten birds an uncomfortable flatness. Nothing is dressed up to tell us how to feel.
The poem is memorable because nobody comes out clean. The household drowns kittens out of convenience, the cat kills out of instinct, and the speaker hates out of devotion to beauty. Each has a reason, and none is entirely excusable. By ending on God and "rest" instead of a verdict, Thomas leaves the judging to someone else. The result is a very small poem about a household pet that asks a large question: why do we feel more for some creatures than others, and are we right to?