The Cat by Miroslav Holub

Sorry this poetry response is late; I haven't had lots of time and I didn't want to throw something together and do a bad response. Anyways, this week, I decided to do a response on The Cat by Miroslav Holub. :)
The first time I read through it, I immediately knew that this was a poem that had to be read out loud.

So I did.

I noticed that there were many pauses in the poem. The words are separated and indented that it causes the reader to take some unnecessary pauses.
For example the first stanza:

Outside it was night
like a book without letters.
And the eternal dark
dripped to the stars through the sieve of the
city.

'Dripped' and 'city' are interrupted by the spacing. I feel like Holub wrote it this way to be more poetic. By spacing it this way, the pauses almost make the poem seem more eloquent. It also seems that with every new line of a word, it's a new comparison. The eternal dark is dripped to the stars, through the city.

This whole poem is about a black cat that leaves, but the person doesn't want it to. I don't think it's a literal interpretation of an actual cat, but perhaps a lost friend. 
"I said to her
do not go
why want
nothing?"

I feel like this is the moment when someone is about to go, that you use any excuse to stop them. It's too painful to let them leave like that without trying to at least stop them, so you resort to any option that you possibly can -- even if it sounds ridiculous.

The tone of the poem is extremely pensive and gloomy. I don't think it's necessarily  a sad, depressed tone, but a "what's-the-meaning-of-life" tone -- which don't get me wrong, can be depressing. There are 6 stanzas that have no particular pattern. I think the reason why some stanzas are shorter than others is the poet doesn't have anything to say to the person leaving, and for the effect. Something with meaning hits a person harder when the line is shorter.

In the end, the person leaves. And both people are left feeling empty. "The cat" may feel resent for leaving and the person sorrow.  The last stanza is what really gives the feeling of gloom and sound. Holub mentions how sometimes, when you try and listen for the cat, you hear your own self.

...Maybe it wasn't a friend. Maybe you lost a bit of yourself.

"a black cat into the black night,
she dissolved
a black cat in the black night,
she just dissolved
and no one ever saw her again.
Not even she herself."

Beautiful.