Nothing much happens in the first two stanzas of "Ballad for a Coal-Black Tom," and that is exactly the point. A black cat and a chipmunk sit at opposite ends of a verandah, and the poem stretches the moment until it hums. The refrain, "A verandah's length between them," returns as the second line of both opening stanzas, as if the distance itself were the subject: a small, ordinary measurement that separates predator from prey and life from death. The poem's central idea is that menace does not need motion. The cat's stillness is a form of action, and the chipmunk's calm is a kind of courage, until both give way to a brief explosion of movement and a comic, unresolved ending.
The first stanza belongs to the cat, and the poet piles up images of restraint. He is "slick," his yellow eyes never betray "his arrested energies," and the phrase "Desire latched from gullet to throat" turns appetite into something bolted shut but straining at the lock. The cat pretends to stare past the chipmunk, as though "his horizon were / Beyond the creature in stripèd fur." That detail is a small piece of psychological insight: the cat's indifference is a performance, a way of hunting without seeming to hunt. The second stanza mirrors this from the chipmunk's side. Here "dread and decorum intermixed," a lovely phrase that gives the animal manners as well as fear. She holds "her fear with assumed repose," refusing to reveal the broken slat that is her escape route. The word "assumed" matters; her calm is as staged as his.
The poem's sound does a great deal of this work. The lines are built on a loose, galloping beat of four stresses, with rhymed couplets (frame/tame, eyes/energies, coat/throat) that click together like the pieces of a trap. The vocabulary is deliberately lofty for such small creatures: "arterial scourge," "blasphemous jaws," "atavistic materialistic." This is mock-heroic writing, in which grand language is applied to a minor event, and it produces two effects at once. It is funny, but it also takes the animals seriously, granting a chipmunk the dignity of a tragic heroine. The slat she hides is even given a fairy-tale password, "an open sesame," though she has "no test word for a shibboleth," so her escape rests on instinct rather than on any magic formula.
The third stanza snaps the tension. The meter quickens, with internal rhyme doing the speeding up: "her small heart burned as her bloodstream churned." When she finally bolts, she is "a current of lightning," a metaphor that makes her speed electric and a little holy. The cat, by contrast, is "immobilized and terrible," and the line where he "barricaded the unhinged slat" shows a pursuit that fails through sheer bulk, since his "obstinate sleek was skeletal fat," a clumsy, paradoxical phrase that hints at his body's absurd compression as he squeezes through. Yet he manages it "with unhurrying grace," and that last phrase is the cat all over: even in a scramble, he refuses to look flustered.
The final stanza changes the mood completely. The rhythm turns bouncy and the language childlike: the cat sniffs, sneezes "a soft kerchoo!", and lies down for a snooze, while the chipmunks sing "the chipmunk blues." After the tension of what came before, this drop into cartoon comedy feels almost like a release of breath. But the poem does not let the cat off lightly. He is "atavistic" and "materialistic," a creature of ancient appetite, and the last lines turn on his "feral heart," which "Set him loose on the prowl again." The comedy is real, but so is the reminder that the hunt has not ended, only paused.
What makes the poem worth reading is this balance. It treats a small domestic standoff with epic seriousness, then deflates it with a sneeze, and in doing so it captures something true about predators and prey: that fear and hunger are patient, and that nature rarely offers a clean ending. The chipmunk survives, but only for now, and the poem is wise enough to leave it there.