"My Cat Jeoffry"

This poem by Christopher Smart is an seems like such a scandalous and visionary thing for a man to write in the mid eighteenth century.  To personify a lowly creature like a cat and then to attribute god-like characteristics appears to be drastically different from the preceding religious works that we have read in class.  I also thoroughly enjoyed the connection Smart makes about seeing and learning about God through nature and animals.  He make Jeoffry's miniscule, commonplace actions to be these beautiful things that reveal God's nature and the nature of the physical world.  The speaker finds that "for by stroking of him I have found out electricity" (66).  This bridges to gap between the high class and isolated audience that was the likely reader of Smart's poetry and the everyday "lowly" things that "common" people interact with---this takes them out of their idea of a God who is only in the church or in the sacred religious things.