Life & Wisdom Quote by W. H. Davies

Davies turns the domesticated cat into a small, private horror: not a monster in the gothic sense, but an everyday presence that unsettles the body into vigilance. The line works because it refuses to justify the fear. “Strange” is repeated like a stammer, a mind circling a sensation it can’t rationalize. That doubling isn’t ornament; it performs the compulsion of anxiety, the way unease returns even after you tell yourself it’s silly. By the time we reach “I cannot sleep,” the cat has already won. Nothing happens. That’s the point.

The subtext is about proximity and power. A cat “near” is intimacy without consent: a creature that chooses you, watches you, moves silently, won’t submit to the human script of loyalty. Davies, a poet whose work often prized simple diction and direct feeling over metropolitan cleverness, leans into plain speech to make the irrational feel credible. He’s not building an argument; he’s reporting a nervous fact.

Context matters: Davies wrote as an outsider to polite society, and his poems frequently register the friction between the human desire for calm order and the natural world’s indifference. The cat becomes nature condensed into a living room: elegant, unreadable, self-possessed. The sleeplessness isn’t just fear of claws in the dark; it’s the discomfort of being observed, of sharing space with something that does not reassure you. In that sense, the line isn’t about cats at all. It’s about how quickly the familiar can tip into the uncanny.