"Jeoffry" - definately not (diddle-diddle bassfiddle) a jazz-playing cat despite all the controlled, head-tune improvisational verbal enflannelment Smart strums-immitates-clarion into place. Cat, in nearly all the sentences , almost achieves the tonality of "Jeff" status, but wonders-off into the extended virons required for winging-it (schwoops! rrw'ong animal just got quilled into the miz - Xin Loi). One could almost make such a poem on his eyelash, nether-lip, rrb'ig toe. As a Pantheist, I have no problem finding the Glory of God in every damn thing in the world - one needs but make a clean mix of the logical with the emotional to elevate from atoms to a snoring wife to make a proper case in this regard: ergo, Gato Felis is goodenow fur the alteraltarings of poem-wise.

The overt use of numbers suggests that something more than nine lives might be in play here: seven, and seven minus one is a good place to start - perfection and ante perfection. Juan E. Cirlot's A Dictionary of Symbols has a lot to say about such digitaliae. Then, again, one could be vulgate, and say that Smart uses a cat to cut some very atonal cheese for himself and his readers. At any rate the whole poem is very ornate, scratches with equal parse the poles between the Baroque and the Rococo. Wish I had the time to mouse around with the ecclessiumate of this cat - gotta be lots of genuinely religious fare to go along with all the poem's other stuff(s).

: Jeoffrey, thou art a cat truly nipped in the baud. Prrairsske!

Carpe Verve all.