Anyone who has crept up on a spring pond knows the experience Dave Bonta's "Rite of spring" squeezes into nine lines: a racket, a few cautious steps, then sudden silence. The poem gives us the whole sequence of discovery, display and disappearance. In doing so it makes a quiet point about how little of the natural world performs for our benefit.
The title promises ceremony. "Rite" suggests something solemn and ancient, a ritual with its own rules. What the poem delivers is wood frogs with "lust blatting from each fat throat." The gap between that lofty title and that blunt phrase is where the poem's humour and honesty live. Bonta doesn't dress mating up as romance. "Lust" is a plain, slightly embarrassing word, and "blatting" is even better. It isn't the pretty trill of birdsong but something closer to a bleat or a blare, and the hard *b* and *t* make you feel the noise in your own mouth. In "each fat throat" the stresses are crammed together, as if the line were inflating. Yet the poem never sneers at the frogs. The rite is convincing precisely because it is so unglamorous.
The form is three unrhymed tercets in free verse, but it isn't shapeless. The first stanza is made of three five-syllable lines: "In small, murky ponds / that appear each spring / along the ridge crest." It reads like a hushed establishing shot. The phrase "appear each spring" also tells us these ponds are temporary, and that anticipates the way the frogs themselves will disappear later. The sentence spills over the stanza break, and the lines then stretch to eight and seven syllables as the frogs swim into view and the noise swells. There is no end-rhyme, but "float" and "throat" chime across neighbouring lines. That sound ties the buoyant image to the noisy one.
The best moment is "float through the reflected treetops." The ponds are "small" and "murky," yet they hold the whole canopy on their surface. The frogs seem to drift through the crowns of the trees, so that muddy ground-level water briefly becomes upper air. The setting "along the ridge crest" adds to the sense of height. It is the poem's one moment of lift, and it sits right beside the crude "lust" without apology. Bonta lets beauty and bawdiness share a stanza, which feels truer to spring than either would alone.
The third stanza changes the viewpoint. Until now the poem has described; now it addresses someone: "Get too close." There is no named "you," but the reader is quietly cast as the walker on the ridge. The word "show" turns the frogs into performers, though the poem implies that nobody invited us to the performance. The rhythm obeys the sense. "Get too close and the show stops" is almost all one-syllable words and ends on a hard, clipped *stops*. The next line, "Another step and they vanish," repeats the stepwise approach, so we feel the scene breaking up one footfall at a time. Notice, too, that the poem never uses the word "silence." The reader has to infer it from the stopped show, and that is more effective than stating it.
The last image, "strings of bubbles," is a trace left behind. The frogs have gone under, and only a few bubbles marks the spot. The final line also softens, its unstressed ending sinking away like the air it describes.
The poem matters because it makes a modest observation and trusts it. It doesn't lecture about nature or turn the frogs into symbols. It simply notices that the more closely we try to witness something, the more likely we are to end it. The poem itself behaves like the ponds it describes: it appears briefly, makes its noise, and slips beneath the surface before we have quite caught up.