Rowse, His Cat

For A. L. Rowse

Proving that Emilia Bassano

was the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets,

beyond reasonable shadow of doubt,

Rowse next eulogized his white tom cat.*

"Then let us have our Liberty again,"

Emilia, herself a poet, said.

"Your fault being greater, why should you disdain

Our being equals, free from tyranny?"†

"My cat and I grow old together," Rowse sigh'd,

he who'd left Tommer in Trenarren

as the guardian of his Cornish domain,

gone Stateside as gainer of what gain?

Such are the quiddities of man and mouse

-r. My cat and I grow old together, too!

* A. L. Rowse, "The White Cat of Trenarren," in The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, chosen by Philip Larkin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 351–52. The cat's name was actually Peter, but that might be puzzling, and Tommer—the name of another of Rowse's cats—fits better here.

† Æmelia Lanyer (née Bassano), Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), quoted in Rowse, Discovering Shakespeare: A Chapter in Literary History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 51–52.