Source identified1
Image design Rose Studio
Read & copy
“What female heart can gold despise? What cat's averse to fish?”
Meaning & context
Gray humorously gives the cat both human vanity and animal appetite, using the joke to set up a mock-moral warning about attractive things that conceal danger.
Source details
“Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes,” represented in Project Gutenberg #11254. The poem is comic mock-moral verse about Horace Walpole’s cat Selima; the gendered eighteenth-century joke remains historical literary language rather than a modern claim about women.