Ernest Hemingway and his cat

Ernest Hemingway, despite his manly bravado, had a soft spot for cats. By 1945, he had amassed 23 of them. His niece writes in the foreword to Hemingway’s Cats: An Illustrated Biography that the author and his fourth wife, Mary, called the cats “purr factories” and “love sponges. On February 22, 1953, one of Hemingway’s cats, Uncle Willie, was hit by a car. Following the accident, Hemingway sent his close friend Gianfranco Ivancich the following distraught and stirring letter, originally featured here last year:

    Dear Gianfranco:

    Just after I finished writing you and was putting the letter in the envelope Mary came down from the Torre and said, ‘Something terrible has happened to Willie.’ I went out and found Willie with both his right legs broken: one at the hip, the other below the knee. A car must have run over him or somebody hit him with a club. He had come all the way home on the two feet of one side. It was a multiple compound fracture with much dirt in the wound and fragments protruding. But he purred and seemed sure that I could fix it.

    I had René get a bowl of milk for him and René held him and caressed him and Willie was drinking the milk while I shot him through the head. I don’t think he could have suffered and the nerves had been crushed so his legs had not begun to really hurt. Monstruo wished to shoot him for me, but I could not delegate the responsibility or leave a chance of Will knowing anybody was killing him…

    Have had to shoot people but never anyone I knew and loved for eleven years. Nor anyone that purred with two broken legs.

 From: Literary Pets: The Cats, Dogs and Birds Famous Authors Loved

The wait

Hands that lust and groins that rust,

Years go by without a must.

Wrinkles come to wreath the one

Whose eyes look up

To days to come.

A man to wait for his own fate,

That is to come on unknown date,

And awhile to dream of her

When the night is dark,

When the moon is gone,

As others feast in flesh,

Bodies, souls, warm and fresh.

Is that not a kind of death?

Is it not a hope for life?

Or is it not?

 The Meeting on Turret Stairs, by Frederick William Burton

Shameful Death (William Morris)

There were four of us about that bed;  

  The mass-priest knelt at the side,      

I and his mother stood at the head,      

  Over his feet lay the bride;    

We were quite sure that he was dead,         

  Though his eyes were open wide.      

He did not die in the night,       

  He did not die in the day,      

But in the morning twilight       

  His spirit pass’d away,                  

When neither sun nor moon was bright,           

  And the trees were merely gray.        

He was not slain with the sword,         

  Knight’s axe, or the knightly spear,   

Yet spoke he never a word             

  After he came in here;           

I cut away the cord     

  From the neck of my brother dear.    

He did not strike one blow,     

  For the recreants came behind,                 

In a place where the hornbeams grow,

  A path right hard to find,       

For the hornbeam boughs swing so     

  That the twilight makes it blind.         

They lighted a great torch then;        

  when his arms were pinion’d fast,      

Sir John the knight of the Fen, 

  Sir Guy of the Dolorous Blast,          

With knights threescore and ten,         

  Hung brave Lord Hugh at last.                  

I am threescore and ten,          

  And my hair is all turn’d gray,

But I met Sir John of the Fen   

  Long ago on a summer day,  

And am glad to think of the moment when               

  I took his life away.   

I am threescore and ten,          

  And my strength is mostly past,         

But long ago I and my men,     

  When the sky was overcast,          

And the smoke roll’d over the reeds of the fen,           

  Slew Guy of the Dolorous Blast.       

And now, knights all of you,    

I pray you pray for Sir Hugh,  

A good knight and a true,                

And for Alice, his wife, pray too.

  William Morris

Song: I love the Jocund dance (William Blake)

I LOVE the jocund dance,
    The softly-breathing song,
Where innocent eyes do glance
    And where lisps the maiden’s tongue.

I love the laughing vale,
    I love the echoing hill,
    Where mirth does never fail,
    And the jolly swain laughs his fill.

I love the pleasant cot,
    I love the innocent bower,
Where white and brown is our lot
    Or fruit in the mid-day hour.

I love the oaken seat,
    Beneath the oaken tree,
Where all the old villagers meet,
    And laugh our sports to see.

I love our neighbours all,
    But, Kitty, I better love thee
And love them I ever shall,
    But thou art all to me.

William Blake