The poem begins with the word "No," as if someone has just asked an awkward question and the speaker is answering it. "No, I don't believe in hell, but wish / I hadn't seen her twitch." The tone is dry and almost casual, but the wish that follows is anything but. By the last line, the speaker's disbelief in damnation has turned into something closer to confession. The central idea is that the worst part of losing the cat is not the absence but the memory of watching her die, and that this memory becomes a punishment the speaker cannot escape.
Roberts builds that memory from sound and touch. The needle, which we can reasonably take to be a vet's injection, "clawed the iris of the mind's-eye." Clawing belongs to the cat, so the instrument of her death borrows her own weapon and turns it on the speaker's inner sight. The cat's cry is a "caterwaul," a word that sounds like what it names, and it "hammered my ears," so that a sound becomes a blow. The speaker doesn't just hear and see the death. Both senses are attacked, and the speaker ends the stanza with the stripped-down "I flinched–", where the dash cuts the line off mid-reaction.
The form helps with this. The poem is free verse, with short, uneven lines that break at awkward moments, so that "panic at being pierced" and "of distress" sit alone like gasps. Rhyme appears only at the start, in "wish" and "twitch," as though the speaker is briefly in control of the language. After that it falls away, and the lines stop sounding composed. The single line in brackets, "(They said it would soon be over.)", stands out most. The parentheses wall off the reassurance as someone else's voice, small and tidy and outside the poem's real feeling. The line is also bitterly ironic, because the death may have been quick, but the memory has not been.
In the second stanza the poem moves from what happened to what it means. "To see her lives / spill out her eyes and empty into mine" plays on the old idea that cats have nine lives, but "lives" in the plural also suggests everything she was. Her whole existence seems to pour from her eyes into the speaker's, which makes the speaker a vessel for a death that wasn't theirs. The next phrase, "feel the images imprinting on me," uses the language of printing or branding, something done to a surface that can't be wiped clean. Then comes the poem's hardest phrase: "her executioner and witness." The word "executioner" implies that the speaker had a hand in the decision, though the poem never says so outright. The guilt is only hinted at, which makes it feel more real. Being both the one who orders the death and the one who must watch it is an impossible double role.
The closing wish is subtly contradictory. The speaker wishes never to have seen her "wilting in that blank abyss alone." The verb "wilting" makes the cat a plant, gently fading, which is a softer picture than the caterwaul but no less sad. And "alone" is painful because the speaker was in the room. Being there did not stop her from facing the "blank abyss" by herself, and the poem seems to know that witnessing is not the same as accompanying.
The last line returns to the opening question: "You needn't ask now if I believe in purgatory." Hell was a place the speaker could dismiss, but purgatory, a place of suffering that is endured and not eternal, is where the speaker now lives. The final line is quiet and understated, and it is the most devastating thing in the poem.
That is what makes it significant. An elegy traditionally mourns the dead and often works toward consolation, but this one refuses to console. It also takes the death of a pet seriously, giving a cat the same weight of grief usually reserved for people. Its subject is the survivor's guilt, which the speaker can neither argue away nor outlive.