A hungry cat sits at the centre of Shelley's poem, and by the last stanza it has been used to take a swipe at people in general. The opening is deliberately mock-solemn. The speaker announces "A cat in distress, / Nothing more, nor less" and swears to the truth "As I am a sinner," like a street preacher with a very small sermon. The cat's tragedy is that it "waits for some dinner / To stuff out its own little belly." Then the poem widens. Hunger is only one of "all the modes of distress / Which torture the tenants of earth," and the cat becomes a way of measuring what human beings suffer from, or think they do.
The form carries much of the joke. Every stanza follows the same pattern of rhyme, aabccb, and the same bouncing rhythm: four short lines of about two beats each, with the third and sixth stretched to three. The effect is close to a nursery rhyme or comic ballad, and the tone is too jaunty for real misery. The rhymes are often openly silly. "Tell ye" is made to chime with "belly," and "society" with "variety." When the speaker talks about "evils, / Which like so many devils," the rhyme turns a conventional picture of torment into something close to a cartoon. The comic rhymes keep reminding us that none of this is meant to be taken at face value.
The middle stanzas are a list of human wants, and the order of the list is where the satire sits. "Some a living require" is reasonable enough. Then comes "others desire / An old fellow out of the way," a dark little joke about waiting for someone to die, and the speaker shrugs it off: "I cannot pretend to say" which want is best. The next stanza drifts from the serious to the trivial. People want "society," "variety," "a tranquil life," food, and then, in the funniest line, "Others, as good, / Only want a wife." The word "Only" does a lot of work. Marriage is set beside dinner as just another appetite, and the line suggests that human desires are less lofty than we like to pretend. Set against all this, the cat is almost admirable. It "Only wanted a rat," a want so simple that it can be satisfied.
The poem closes by echoing its opening. "To stuff out its own little belly" comes back as "To stuff out its own little maw," and "maw" is a blunter, more animal word than "belly." The repetition makes a frame, but the poem swerves at the last moment. The speaker says it would be "as good" if "SOME people had such food, / To make them HOLD THEIR JAW!" The phrase "as good" picks up the earlier "Others, as good," and the rhyme of "food" with "good" returns too. The capital letters read like a raised voice, and the target changes from the human race to a particular sort of person, the talker. Nothing in the poem says who these people are, so any reading of them is guesswork. What the text does show is a pun hidden in the rhyme: "maw" and "jaw" are both mouths. The cat's mouth is filled with a rat and so is happy. A mouth full of food cannot talk, and that is the speaker's wish for the chatterers.
The poem is slight, and it knows it. Beside the visionary Shelley of "Ode to the West Wind" or the bitter irony of "Ozymandias," it looks like a doodle in the margin. Even so, it shows how a very small subject can carry an attack on human behaviour. It also shows Shelley's ear for sound and timing. The rhythm sets up the expectation of a gentle joke, the list builds it, and the capitalised ending delivers a sharper one than we expected. The cat's plain, honest hunger makes every other want in the poem look more complicated, and more foolish, by comparison.