Smut in comments mentioned Rilke, and I vaguely remembered that Rilke, in turn, had something to do with leopards, which turns out to be true, except the German name for the cat (
Pantherus pardus) isn't "leopard", of course, which is why my memory was vague (in addition to hardly having read any Rilke at all in English, to be truthful, let alone German); it's
Der Panther that is the title of Rilke's more-or-less most famous poem, which makes English speakers (including me, obviously) think of the all-black variety and not the spotted animal Rilke saw at the Paris zoo in early November 1902.
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| Animal artists at the Jardin des Plantes, anonymous, from the magazine L'Illustration, August 7 1902. Via Wikimedia Commons. |
Anyway, I did a translation—
