Thomas Gray (1716–1771) occupies a serious place in any standard list of English poets, even though he published only 13 poems in his lifetime and his collected poetry — including his Latin poems, fragments, and translations — number only 75 works. As we noted earlier this year, when Gray’s “On the Death of Richard West” was the Sun’s Poem of the Day, it’s impossible to think of a truly comparable poet in English.

Of course, a writer is cut considerable slack when his work includes such poems as “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (1742) and the inescapable “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751). Or today’s poem. “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes” (1747). Rhymed aabccb, the seven six-line stanzas have an interesting rhythmical pattern: iambic tetrameter couplets, followed by a trimeter line, the shorter third and sixth line signaling their connection with a rhyme: “She stretched in vain to reach the prize. / What female heart can gold despise? / What cat’s averse to fish?”

Playing with tropes of ancient Greek mythology, the poem relates the death of a cat, the favorite of the author’s household, that fell into a fish bowl. And it concludes with the famous warning: “Not all that tempts your wandering eyes / And heedless hearts, is lawful prize; / Nor all that glisters, gold.”