Does anyone know who wrote "Curiosity killed the cat"? Or was the author unknown? I really enjoy this poem but can not seem to find it. Please help!

Thanks, Lesley

-- Lesley Ragusin (aragusin@computron.net), June 21, 1999

Answers

Curiosity may have killed the cat by Alastair Reid - Scotland b.1926

Curiosity may have killed the cat, more likely the cat was just unlucky, or else curious to see what death was like, having no cause to go on licking paws, or fathering litter on litter of kittens, predictably.

Nevertheless, to be curious is dangerous enough. To distrust what is always said, what seems, to ask odd questions, interfere in dreams, leave home, smell rats, have hunches does not endear him to those doggy circles where well-smelt baskets, suitable wives, good lunches are the order of things, and where prevails much wagging of incurious heads and tails.

Face it. Curiosity will not cause him to die, Only lack of it will. Never to want to see the other side of the hill, Or that improbable country where living is an idyll (although a probable hell), would kill us all.

Only the curious have, if they live, a tale worht telling at all.

Dogs say he loves too much, is irresponsible, is changeable, marries too many wives, deserts his children, chills all dinner tables with tales of his nine lives.

Well, he is lucky. Let him be nine-lived and contradictory, curious enough to change, prepared to pay the cat price, which is to die and die again and again, each time with no less pain.

A cat minority of one is all that can be counted on to tell the truth. And what he has to tell on each return from hell is this: that dying is what the living do, that dying is what the loving do, and that dead dogs are those who do not know that hell is where, to live, they have to go.

-- ilza (ilza@pobox.com), June 22, 1999.