"The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" is a poem by Edward Lear that is typically categorized as being an example of his beloved nonsense poetry. This can be a misleading term, leading the unfamiliar to suppose that it is poetry with made-up words and no particular structure or storyline. Among the rather flexible characterizations of nonsense poetry is one that does, in fact, apply to this example. It is nonsense in the sense of featuring absurd characters within an unlikely series of events. The elopement of a fowl and a feline certainly meets the qualifications of absurdity. The difference between more outlandish examples of this poetic form and Lear's poem is that not only is it not nonsense, but it is perfectly coherent thematically.
The poem begins with the owl and cat setting sail together in a boat for a faraway land. The opening stanza could very well be a perfectly sensical poem about an elopement if the characters were, for instance, a couple from feuding families instead of two different species of animal. Or, more fittingly perhaps, if it were a same-sex couple hopping into the boat to sail away from a narrow-minded society rather than to anywhere in particular.
Since his death, it has come to light that Lear was himself a closet homosexual living in one of the most sexually repressive regimes in modern history: England during the reign of Queen Victoria. That he would write a story that is ostensibly about forbidden cross-species love couched as a playful children's tale makes perfect sense under these conditions. This interpretation also introduces a perfectly sensible reason for Pussy-cat cat more often than not being addressed in shortened form that is also a slang term for a vagina: "O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love, / What a beautiful Pussy you are." This could just as easily be a conscious attempt at further closeting his homosexuality as it could be an unconscious wink toward his more knowing readership who get the political subtext. The repetition of that slang term five times in the first stanza does come to seem rather strikingly pointed since it is repeated just one more time afterward.
Having established in that opening stanza that this is basically a story an elopement within the framework of forbidden love, the rest of the poem goes on to sustain the nonsensical absurdity that remains thematically coherent. It is established by Pussy-cat that they have been delayed in their attempt to officially sacrament their relationship with a wedding and then, furthermore, that this sacrament requires a ring. In other words, the ring and not the marriage license becomes the symbol of legal recognition of the union. That the ring comes straight from the nose of a pig is both brilliantly absurd and subversive. The symbol of legal recognition of this forbidden love is undermined by the fact that this it originates as a symbol of oppression: a ring through the nose being an idiomatic phrase for slavish adherence.
Interestingly, once the Owl and Pussy-cat have been wedded, the narrative quickly peters out to something of an anticlimax. The final four lines of the poems are comprised of the same seven words. This spectacularly unlikely couple are left by the reader doing something that seems almost purposely at odds with the nonsense qualities that came before: "They danced by the light of the moon."
There seems to be only one reason why Lear would have his cross-species lovers go out on such a mundane scene. The poem first situates that the love affair between a bird and feline is possible. Having become possible, the marriage normalizes it. By the end this forbidden love has become mundane. Leaving the characters on that beach doing what most married couples do at their wedding reception is actually a bold statement implying that consensual romance between any two lovers is as far from nonsense as it is possible to get.
