Jeoffry

Jeoffry was the pet cat of the English poet Christopher Smart, and the sole companion of his confinement. In the 1760s Smart was held in an asylum, cut off from friends and society, and it was there that he wrote the sprawling religious poem 'Jubilate Agno'. Buried within it is a passage of around seventy lines beginning "For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry" — a rapturous, closely observed hymn to the one living creature who kept him company.

What makes the passage extraordinary is its patient attention. Smart watches Jeoffry wake, wash, stretch and play, and reads devotion and grace into every ordinary feline gesture: the way he wreathes his body seven times with elegant quickness, sharpens his claws, and considers a mouse. Lines such as "For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him" turn a cat's morning routine into an act of worship, and the whole is now regarded as one of the finest poems ever written about a cat.

The manuscript of 'Jubilate Agno' was not published in Smart's lifetime and only appeared in print in 1939, long after his death. Since then the Jeoffry section has taken on a life of its own — anthologised endlessly, set to music by Benjamin Britten in his festival cantata 'Rejoice in the Lamb', and cherished by cat lovers who recognise their own animals in every line.

Jeoffry himself left no other trace on history. He was, as far as anyone knows, an entirely ordinary cat. But through the eye of a lonely, brilliant poet he became perhaps the most lovingly documented cat of the eighteenth century — proof that a single devoted animal can be company enough to inspire great art.