Samuel Tongue

So there is definitely a sense that this animal has been alongside this human for some time.

It feels like initially this is a description of a kind of taxidermied animal, but at the same time, he's still alive.

He's still trying and failing to climb to his chair, shirks in one corner of the kitchen.

And the title...

it kind of gives you that idea of it being a study in the kind of old-fashioned sense of the word cat failing we discussed how that two-word title was significant in the in the sense that it had a comma in between so it wasn't cat failing or failing cat it was cat failing and that

kind of emphasis that's brought about by the comma there just really demonstrates how the reader is supposed to enter this poem and supposed to sit with the poem.

It's very slow.

The amount of detail, as I say, that builds up in the first stanza

It's not kind of rushed through.

It's a slow poem and that's what it's supposed to be like.

It's supposed to spend time with this cat and the image of this cat that is being created.

it doesn't disappear off and away, it studies.

And then we're invited to study it as well.

Right until those final few lines where there's kind of what we, yeah, when we were reading it,

worked out was a kind of reverse anthropomorphism where the animal itself morphs into, especially the face, the face of this animal morphs into a human face or at least hints at or represents or echoes at a kind of human visage.

And in that, the way in which it slowly kind of comes to that conclusion, we realized again that there was, that this is what it's supposed to be trying to impart, that the shame, exploring shame and degradation and ultimately humanity is what this poem is trying to do.

It's doing it through the cat, but at the same time, the cat isn't necessarily

Yeah, there's not a hierarchy here.

The cat and the human face are both as shamed as each other in this kind of gradual aging and demise.

So although the poet is using the cat to explore that nature of kind of degradation and shirking, there's definitely a sense that the cat and the human face