"The Blue Bowl"

Jane Kenyon sounds sad and depressed while keeping “The Blue Bowl” chock full of symbols representing the death of her cat. To begin with, the speaker calls the buriers ‘primitives’, this is a reference to the Egyptians that worshipped cats just as she loved her own. The “white feathers between his toes” are symbolic of an angel’s wings and his “aquiline nose” shows freedom in death. Storms are used to reflect one’s emotions and the storm of that night is no different. However, when it clears in the morning, the speaker regrets burying the blue bowl with the cat. This can be seen from the dripping, or crying, bush that the robin is in. Robins are unique for their blue eggs which symbolizes the blue bowl that the bush, or speaker, is crying over. The clincher here is the simile at the end that the neighbor was well intentioned as was the burier but in the end did the wrong thing just as the burier did. All of these symbols clearly point to the speaker’s sorrow over the death of her cat.