Tuesday, January 19, 2021

Re-composition of the Cat Poem

My son Jaeuk liked the poem but also suggested a slight emendation. He wanted me to delete "of the" in line seven, resulting in this: "And they hear the wild call." I preferred to keep my original version of the line, for various reasons, but my son did motivate me to consider other changes, and here is my slightly edited re-composition:

Kitty, Kitty

Cats are mysterious creatures.
They look like they're made of fluff
and finely feathered features
that furnish their inner stuff.

But they're red in truth and all
of the vicious carnivore arts.
And they hear the wild of the call
in the nature that makes up their parts.

Rewriting took longer than the original writing. Here are the originals. Verse 3: "and tiny feathered features". Verse 8: "of the nature that makes up their parts". Is the result worth the changes from these?

2 Comments:

At 10:13 AM, Blogger Kevin Kim said...

I assume "the wild of the call" is a deliberate reference to "the call of the wild," just as "red in truth and all" is a reference to "red in tooth and claw," hence the desire not to change the phrasing.

 
At 4:02 PM, Blogger Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

Exactly right.

Jeffery Hodges

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