A man travels to Twickenham for peace and quiet, and the poem lets us watch the plan quietly fall apart. In six short lines, Dave Bonta sketches a self-indulgent retreat and the household labour it depends on. The speaker wants to sit, to think, to be alone. By the last line we see who has been doing the work while he does so.
The opening is a promise. "I went to Twickenham to sit / I went to Twickenham to think" repeats the same eight-syllable line with one word swapped, and the swap matters. Sitting is bodily and passive, thinking is mental and ambitious, so the second line sounds like a step up in seriousness. Yet the poem never reports a single thought. Where we expect the fruits of thinking, we get "alone in a closet", a phrase with no verb, as though even the grammar has shut itself in. A closet here most likely means a small private room, but the word still raises a faint comic picture of a grown man travelling to a place in order to sit in a cupboard.
Then comes the instrument. "I played on my flageolet" is the one moment of real action, and it quietly replaces the thinking. The flageolet is a small, thin-voiced wind instrument, so it is a slightly absurd tool for profound meditation. The sound of the word helps too. "Closet" and "flageolet" form a rhyme on the final syllable, but the stresses fall differently, so the rhyme sounds a little off-balance. It is neat enough to notice and loose enough to feel casual, as if the speaker were humming it.
The poem's rhythm is worth counting. The lines run roughly eight, eight, six, seven, nine and eleven syllables. After the steady opening pair, the third line shrinks to match the closet, then the lines grow, and the last one sprawls. That swelling feels like the outside world pressing in on the speaker's little room. There is no punctuation at all, so the whole piece runs on as one breath, a spoken or jotted voice that never stops to reflect on itself.
Sound ties the ending together. The bell-man "came by with his bell", and the repeated word is almost funny, since the bell is both the man's tool and his identity. A bell-man was a kind of public crier who announced things aloud, so he is the opposite of solitude, the town's noise arriving at the speaker's door. His bell then finds an echo in the final word, "still", which shares its l-sound. That last word is the poem's best joke and its sharpest point. As an adverb, "still" means "yet" or "continuing": the wife and the maid are "a-washing still", at it as long as he has been gone. As an adjective, it means quiet and motionless, which is exactly what the speaker went to Twickenham to find. He gets stillness for himself, while the women's work never goes still at all.
The line is also grammatically slippery. After "till the bell-man came by with his bell", the verb "left" could belong to the bell-man or to the speaker, who is, after all, the one who went away. The poem doesn't settle it, and the ambiguity is useful, because either way the wife and the maid are left behind with the washing. Judging by the old-fashioned diction ("a-washing", "bell-man", "flageolet"), the voice sounds like an earlier century's, perhaps a diary entry boiled down to its essentials. The poem itself doesn't tell us, and it doesn't need to.
What makes the piece worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It never accuses the speaker or lectures him. It simply arranges his own plain words so that his priorities show: music before thought, solitude before company, his own quiet before other people's labour. The humour is gentle, but the questions underneath are not, and a reader finishes the last line still asking who gets to retreat, who pays for it, and what the retreat is really for.