Six short lines are enough for Dave Bonta to sketch an entire funeral, and it is not the kind most of us would expect. Instead of hymns and a hushed congregation, the speaker asks for a "merry rump" of people, a meal, a hidden grave, and a horse. The poem is about how a person might want to be sent off, and its central idea is that death should be met with company, food and a little irreverence rather than with solemn, expensive ritual.
The form follows the genre promised by the title. Instructions are commands, and the poem is built from imperatives: "Call up," "Dine," "Dine." There is no "I" and no feeling stated outright. The speaker just gives orders, in the clipped voice of a will or a list of arrangements. Three unrhymed couplets stack neatly, like three clauses in a document. The lines are short, mostly five to seven syllables, so each one lands almost like a proverb. The lack of rhyme keeps the tone casual, but the poem is full of smaller sound effects. "Merry," "buttery" and "money" all end on the same soft, rising vowel, which links the cheerful crowd to the church that is being mocked. The last line, "on the horse of the house," has a trotting beat (on the HORSE of the HOUSE) that fits its subject.
The key phrase is the first one: "merry rump." A rump is the leftover part of a group, a small remnant, so the speaker may be asking for a handful of loyal, cheerful friends rather than a crowd. The word is also blunt and bodily, and it makes the line funny. The next line adds a second possibility. Because "to carry to the grave" has no clear object, the rump might be the group doing the carrying, or it might be what is being carried, the body itself. The poem does not choose between them, and that ambiguity is part of its dark humor. The mourners and the corpse are almost the same absurd, earthy thing.
The second couplet turns on the word "buttery," which does a lot of work. A buttery can be a storeroom for food and drink, and the word also suggests something smooth, rich and greasy. A "buttery / church of money" is therefore an institution that seems well fed and slick with wealth. The line break after "buttery" leaves the adjective hanging for a beat before the church arrives, as if the speaker were licking the word first. The instruction to dine "below" this church can be read literally, as down the hill or out of its sight, or socially, as beneath it in status. In both readings the speaker is turning away from the official, paid-for kind of mourning and choosing a plain meal instead.
The last couplet moves from the churchyard to a "secluded grave." The first couplet ended with a body carried "to the grave," and the final one stays there, so the poem travels from the procession to the resting place. "Secluded" is the opposite of the public church. This is a private spot, perhaps hard to find, and the feast happens there among the dead, not away from them. Then comes the strangest phrase, "the horse of the house." The poem never explains it. Because the instruction is to dine "on" it, the horse might be food, which would make the meal a slightly pagan sacrifice. It might also be a riddling way of naming a hearse, a household animal or something else the family owns. I would treat it as a deliberate puzzle. The poem's strangeness is part of what makes its funeral feel so far from the usual one.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much attitude it fits into so little space. It is playful, but its jokes point at real questions about who profits from death and who gets to decide how we are remembered. Its answer is that a good send-off is made of friends, a shared meal and a quiet piece of ground. The riddles it leaves unsolved are the reason a reader keeps coming back to it.