This week’s choice is “Five Eyes” by Walter de la Mare, which I’ve chosen because it tells a story in fourteen lines.

In Hans’ old Mill his three black cats
Watch the bins for the thieving rats.
Whisker and claw, they crouch in the night,
Their five eyes smouldering green and bright:
Walter de la Mare (1873—1956)

Poem 325. Five Eyes

In Hans’ old Mill his three black cats
Watch the bins for the thieving rats.
Whisker and claw, they crouch in the night,
Their five eyes smouldering green and bright:
Squeaks from the flour sacks, squeaks from where
The cold wind stirs on the empty stair,
Squeaking and scampering, everywhere.

Then down they pounce, now in, now out,
At whisking tail, and sniffing snout;
While lean old Hans he snores away
Till peep of light at break of day;
Then up he climbs to his creaking mill,
Out come his cats all grey with meal—
Jekkel, and Jessup, and one-eyed Jill.

This sonnet, like so many of de la Mare’s poems, conjures up vivid images. We can picture the cats hunting the rats and mice and imagine Hans the miller asleep in the old windmill.

The rhyming scheme is AABBCCC and then the pattern repeats with different rhymes: DDEEFFF.

The first half of the poem sets the scene, with the cats lying in wait for their prey, watching every movement as cats will until they choose to pounce. The second half shows the action, as they spring at the rodents and hunt them down, but it’s contrasted by the image of Hans the miller soundly asleep until daybreak—we see him climb up, and I get a sense that this climb is laborious, as if Hans creaks as much as his mill does. Finally, the cats appear from their hunting ground, dusty with the by products of the miller’s work, and the last thing we’re told is their names: “Jekkel, and Jessup, and one-eyed Jill.” The names seem appropriate somehow, the alliteration of their initials kind of punctuates the line, and the staccato sound of the “J” makes me think of the suddenness of their attack on the rats.

Like his poems “The Listeners” and “Someone,” we discover some intriguing questions: where is the mill? Who buys the miller’s products? How did Jill come to have only one eye? There are no answers, it is like a snapshot of something in progress—we see only a brief snatch of the story, courtesy of de la Mare’s story-telling. The beauty of this is that, like the best stories, the details are left to the reader to elaborate—we don’t need an extensive back story, we simply have the mill, its occupant, his three feline companions and their prey.

I like it because it tells a story in a few well-chosen words.

Smouldering Green and Bright

Poem 325. Five Eyes

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