Torquato Tasso’s “Cat” Sonnets

Two Tasso’s cat sonnets, very different in mood, written during the poet’s seven- year stay in the Ferrara mental hospital (1579–1586), are examined from the point of view of their stylistic peculiarities: the use of Petrarchian topoi in the first sonnet, an appeal to the traditions of comic poetry – in the second. In addition to their artistic merits, the sonnets deserve attention because they are at the origin of the cat theme in European non-didactic literature. The cat has long been a character in fables, later in bestiaries, but it became a subject of lyric poetry quite late. The cat enters the field of poetic consciousness only when it acquires a new status: persecuted in the Middle Ages and perceived as a purely utilitarian pest control, it is transformed into an animal companion, a pet in the modern sense, in other words, it is domesticated (finally in the 16th century). The underlying shift from a utilitarian approach to the surrounding world towards cognitive and aesthetic interest dates back to the 14th century and is associated with Petrarch, a great connoisseur of solitary walks accompanied by beloved dogs. The legend attributes the poet also the cat, but it is not known for certain. One of the first works of European poetry on the theme of a cat (if you don’t count the anonymous poem of the 9th century in Old Irish under the conventional name Pangur Ban, discovered only at the beginning of the 20th century) was the “Épitaphe d’un chat” (1558) of the French poet Du Bellay. The two sonnets by Tasso are also among the very few earliest works on the cat theme.