Raining cats and dogs

It was my creative writing group today, and although for various reasons all were not present, we still had a very enjoyable time and our talk ranged over many different aspects of writing and story telling (and many other things as well! Someone used the phrase ‘raining cats and dogs’ and we wondered what its origins were and I said I would try and find out.

Although the phrase has been used at least since the seventeenth century, there are no really clear explanations of how it really did come about. All sorts of ludicrous theories abound – dogs and cats sheltering in the thatch of houses and being washed out in heavy rain… no, dogs and cats would be snoozing by the hearth! Other ideas suggest Viking origins, middle ages images of witches, French waterfalls, dead creatures being washed along gutters in violent rainstorms… but actually no-one really does know.

Henry Vaughan the poet used the phrase, as does Jonathan Swift a century later. Vaughan is possibly most renowned for a very beautiful poem, The World. This poem doesn’t have any mention of cats and dogs, but here is the first verse:

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright,
And round beneath it,
Time in hours, days, years
Driv’n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world
And all her train were hurl’d