Woman and Cat

Paul Verlaine’s early poem, “Woman and Cat,” depicts an intimate scene in which a woman and a cat play, but beneath the apparent charm lies a tension between gentleness and ferocity. The poem is a sonnet composed of two quatrains and two tercets, in alexandrines, with enclosed rhymes in the quatrains and flat rhymes in the tercets. This regular structure contrasts with the characters’ mischief.

From the first quatrain, the woman “was playing with her cat,” and the poet marvels to see “the white hand and the white paw” moving in “the evening shadow.” The image is graceful, almost a ballet of whiteness, but the shadow already announces a duality. The repetition of “white” underscores a deceptive purity, while the twilight atmosphere prepares for the revelation of what lies hidden.

The second quatrain unveils the hidden side: the woman, “the sly one,” conceals beneath “those black-thread mittens” her “murderous agate nails,” “sharp and bright as a razor.” The mineral metaphor and the adjective “murderous” turn the hand into a weapon. The black of the mittens contrasts with the initial white, and feigned gentleness becomes cunning. The cat, too, “also played the sweet one” and drew in her claw, but “the devil lost nothing by it”: the irony emphasizes that beneath the play, predation remains intact.

The tercets tighten the focus. The woman’s “airy” laughter tinkles in the boudoir, a closed and intimate space, while “four points of phosphorus” shine: these are the feline’s eyes, unsettling glimmers in the half-light. The musicality of the lines, with the alliteration in “r” and liquid sounds, creates a harmony that contrasts with the threat. The title, “Woman and Cat,” places the two creatures on equal footing, and the implicit comparison makes the woman a cat, and vice versa.

Thus, this sonnet plays on the ambiguity between appearance and reality: beneath coquetry and gentleness, a latent violence surfaces. Verlaine, through precise and suggestive writing, paints a scene of seduction and duplicity in which the reader discovers that charm is never without danger.