A kitten sits in a wet tub, indignant, and has no way to say so. That small comic scene carries the whole of Mary Carolyn Davies's "Cat Language," a poem that begins as a grumble about bath time and ends as something closer to a lament about what happens when one creature simply cannot make itself understood by another.
The kitten's grievance is clear and, from a cat's point of view, entirely reasonable. It doesn't like water. Yet the "little daughter" of its mistress "shoves me in the tub / And spoils my fur." The verb matters: shoves is not a gentle word, and it tells us how the kitten experiences the event, not as care but as a rough interruption. The child is surely trying to be kind, but the poem never lets us see her intentions. We see only what the kitten sees, and from down there, kindness looks a lot like bullying.
What gives the complaint its edge is the kitten's sense of fairness. The parenthesis in the second stanza, "(I know she'd cry / If I did it to her!)", is the sharpest moment in the poem. Written as an aside, it sounds like a muttered remark, the sort of thing you say under your breath when you know you can't win the argument out loud. It also shows the kitten reasoning by the same rule children are taught: don't do to others what you wouldn't want done to you. The joke is that the kitten applies this rule to the very child who may have taught it.
Then comes the kitten's practical argument. "I can bathe myself. / So can any cat." The short, flat sentences sound like someone laying out an obvious fact to a slow audience. "There's no excuse / For things like that!" ends the stanza on a note of offended dignity, with the exclamation mark doing the work of a stamped paw. The kitten is not merely wet; it is insulted. Its competence has been ignored, and being treated as helpless stings more than the water does.
The final stanza turns the poem from a squabble into a small dilemma. "I ought to complain," the kitten admits, then pauses on "Yes, but how?" That question is the real subject of the poem. The title, "Cat Language," points straight at it: the kitten has plenty to say and a perfectly good language to say it in, but the humans around it do not know "the meaning / Of meow?" The poem is a kind of translation, giving us in human words what the kitten cannot get across, and it quietly asks us to notice how often we fail to listen to those who can't speak our way.
The form suits this gentle comedy. The lines are short, mostly just two or three stresses long, and they are staggered on the page, each second line indented, so the poem hops along like a nervous, bristling little creature. The rhymes are simple and snappy: water and daughter, fur and her, cat and that. The final pair, "how" and "meow," is the funniest, because the rhyme itself lands on the sound the kitten is making. In the last line, the very word that fails to communicate becomes the poem's punchline. The unusual choice to end on a question mark, instead of a settled statement, leaves the kitten's problem hanging, unanswered.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. In a handful of lines it gives an animal a voice, a personality, and a real sense of injustice, without ever turning sentimental. Children will recognise the kitten's frustration, since they too are often told what is good for them and not asked. The poem invites us to laugh at the kitten's outrage and, a little uncomfortably, to wonder what other small voices we have failed to hear.