Sam the grocer's cat does not need anyone else to introduce him. He does it himself, in the very first line, with a flourish borrowed from the language of grand announcements: "Behold the village grocer's cat!" The mock-heroic opening sets the tone for everything that follows. Here is a creature who has taken the humblest job imaginable, guarding a shop's stock of boxes and bins, and who treats it with the swagger of a conquering general. The poem is a character sketch in the first person, and the character is irresistible: proud, lazy, dangerous and utterly unashamed.
What makes the portrait work is how neatly it balances two sides of Sam's life. By day he is a domestic ornament, parking himself "on crowded shelf" or dozing in the shop window to "purr in the sun's warm glow / And watch the circling flies below." By night he is something far rougher, roaming "as dictates my sweet will" and intruding on "many a cat date" until "an old feud is renewed." The word "thrill" in the fifth stanza gives away what he really values. Mice are food, and the window is comfort, but the night-time brawls are where he feels most alive.
The final stanza delivers the joke the whole poem has been building toward. "My ears are slit; and cocked one eye; / And I well know the reason why." Sam never describes a fight, because he doesn't need to; his battered face does the telling. The shrug that follows, "But what of that?", is the poem's emotional centre. He neither complains nor boasts about his injuries. He simply accepts them as the price of a life lived on his own terms, then retreats to his identity: "I'm just the grocer's cat." The word "just" is delightfully false modesty, since everything we have heard suggests he is a good deal more than that.
The poem's form mirrors its subject. Colwell avoids a regular stanza pattern, and the lines stretch and shrink and are indented unevenly on the page, much like a cat sprawling and curling in odd corners. Short lines such as "Named Sam" and "Well armed and fleet" land like quick paw-strikes, while the longer lines about the window and the sun slow the rhythm down into a drowsy purr. The rhymes are playful and sometimes deliberately blunt: "cat" and "that," "Sam" and "am," and the triple run of "feet," "fleet" and "eat." The rhyme on "rude" and "renewed" is a small comic gem, with its polite apology for behaviour that is anything but polite. Even the ending's "That's who I am ! !" with its doubled exclamation marks sounds like a cat announcing itself from a doorstep.
The language rewards close attention too. Sam talks in a slightly antique register, with phrases like "Behold," "'Twixt box and bin," and "'Tis thus I gather many a thrill." This sounds absurdly formal for an animal who eats "many a tender mouse," and the clash is the source of much of the humour. The word "tender" is a particularly sly choice: it makes the mouse sound like a delicacy on a menu, and it lets Sam sound like a gourmet rather than a killer. "Foe, and woe, to sneaking rat" has a similar relish, its chiming sounds making the threat feel more like a boast than a warning.
The poem's lasting charm lies in its confidence. It would be easy to write about a cat as sentimental pet or as sinister predator. Colwell gives us something more interesting: an animal with a code, a routine and a sense of humour about itself, one who is both comfortable and scarred, both domestic and wild. Sam seems to understand something people often take years to learn, that you can be perfectly content with a modest position in the world as long as you inhabit it fully. He is a small figure with a large personality, and in a few dozen lines the poem makes him impossible to forget.