I'm surprised that the two respondents who've already commented on this poem obviously know this joke. I heard it in Tehran in the 1970's (that dates me . . .) when it was told to me as an object lesson in how Westerners and those from the Middle East convey bad news - the crass guy who says "You're cat's dead" is the Westerner, the guy who advises him to go all round the houses and work up to the bad news is from the Middle East. The crass guy doesn't really get it, but doing his best he says that Grandma has climbed a tree (in the version I heard . .). So seeing the joke in the poem was a nice surprise for me. I like the levity a lot, and No the final "rhyme" doesn't really bother me - in that way I think it's a bit like the way the zany meter in Alicia's sonnet marks the bats' zig-zag flight: the formal wrongness of the "rhyme" seems to underline the social wrongness of what the crass guy is saying: there's a social faux pas signalled by a formal faux pas. What I really admire in this sonnet is the way a quite complicated anecdote is laid apparently without much strain across the sonnet structure. It seems easy until you try to do it: it's very hard in fact, in my experience, to lay out a little narrative within sonnet form and make it seem inevitable, to have it "fit" the form so apparently effortlessly. That's really art hiding art, as Horace tells us to.
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Hybrid Mode
