THE RAT is the concisest tenant.
He pays no rent,—
Repudiates the obligation,
On schemes intent.Balking our wit
To sound or circumvent,
Hate cannot harm
A foe so reticent.Neither decree
~Emily Dickinson
Prohibits him,
Lawful as
Equilibrium.
In our house it’s mice, but otherwise essentially the same thing. They don’t pay rent, and balk our wit constantly. Sometimes they even show up inside the house in the middle of summer, when the outside world is brimful of goodness for them, as if to remind us that they do not do anything expected.
Mice, though, are small and, until they poop in your silverware drawer, cute. Rats are a different matter. I wonder where the human repulsion toward them began. Did it start with the plague? Does it go back farther? What’s interesting to me in this poem is that Dickinson doesn’t seem squicked out by them. Rather, they are little schemers going about their daily business.
Interestingly, when I searched for images of rats on Pexels.com, I found only mice. Apparently we have a lot of baggage when it comes to rats, and not a lot of pictures.
The Emily Project 