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“The Panther” is a distressingly haunting poem. The animal’s impotent, rhythmical pacing is echoed in the poem’s iambic pentameter, reinforced by insistent repetitions, rhymes, and assonances in the German original. Since the panther’s world is cruelly confined, the word “Stabe” (“bars”) occurs no fewer than three times in the first four lines augmented by its internal, nasal rhyme with “gabe”, and again reinforced by the reiteration of “a thousand”. The cage’s narrow enclosure and the mechanical monotony of the panther’s stunted life, each of his steps cancelled by his captivity, are mirrored in the poem’s rhetoric and form. In “Morgue,” directly preceding “The Panther,” the eyes of the dead have turned behind their lids. In “The Panther,” the viewer’s gaze is again thwarted by a cat’s gaze. The panther, a mere ruin of its animal self, exerts the same authority as does the marble ruin of Apollo.