The Blue Bowl

“The Blue Bowl” is a 16-line, single-stanza free verse poem from the perspective of a speaker who has just buried her pet cat. The speaker begins in the first-person plural, establishing the presence of another intimate figure, and she establishes a blunt tone: “Like primitives we buried the cat / with his bowl” (Lines 1-2). With these lines, Kenyon introduces a central theme of the poem: The human desire for ritual and comfort in the face of death, and the ways in which these rituals still fall short. The word “primitive” (Line 1), which suggests something at its most basic level, implies that the speaker is ill-equipped to process the emotion she feels, and is grasping for ways to find meaning in the wake of the cat’s death. She wants to give the cat a good burial, but the tools she has available to perform the burial rites are lacking.

The speaker and her partner include the cat’s bowl in the grave as a ritual, one they enact in the hope of gaining a sense of comfort and closure. By including the cat’s bowl, they mark the end of his life with the inclusion of an important daily object, trying to imbue the object, and thus the cat’s death, with meaning.