Six short lines are enough to pack a whole departure. In Dave Bonta's "Rimbaud, 1880," a speaker finds, for the first time in his life, a moment of quiet, and uses it to decide to leave. The title supplies a name and a year, and the poem adds no road, destination or reason. Readers who know that Rimbaud turned away from poetry and travelled far from Europe will hear that story behind the lines. But what the poem dramatises is smaller and stranger: the inner bookkeeping that comes before leaving.
That bookkeeping is built into the vocabulary. The speaker has "borrowed" quiet, he will "settle" his "accounts," and he has fear "in hand," like cash. Even "furnish" belongs to the language of buying and equipping. Departure here is not a storm or a slammed door but a ledger being closed. Judging by the imagery, the quiet is something on loan, not owned, and a loan has to be used before it is called in. That gives the calm an undertone of urgency. He must act while the stillness lasts.
The line breaks do much of the work. The second line ends on a bare "am," so for a moment we hear only "I am," and then the next line adds "resolved." The two sentences meet mid-line: "resolved to go. I settle." The word "settle" is the sharpest move in the poem. It usually means to stop and put down roots, yet here it means to pay off what is owed. Staying and leaving are folded into one verb, and the line break holds it up for a beat before "my accounts" arrives.
The grammar of "with myself / and fear in hand" is also doubled. He may be settling accounts with himself and with fear, or settling them while holding fear, the way one holds a purchase or a leash. Both readings fit. Fear is neither denied nor conquered. It is counted, kept and carried along. The poem also gives fear its shortest line. There is no rhyme, and the lines run at about seven syllables each (by my count 7, 7, 7, 6, 4, 7), so "and fear in hand" falls to four and reads like a held breath. The shape on the page mirrors the nerve it describes.
Sound supports this. The opening is soft and hushed, with the "qu" of "quiet" and the long "i" of "life." By the end the consonants harden, and "furnish my mind with a tent" closes on one blunt syllable. The last line is also the strangest image. "Furnish" belongs to rooms, with chairs, shelves and the comfort of staying put. A tent is the opposite: cloth, temporary, folded and carried. The mind becomes a room, and what he puts in it is a shelter that can be packed up. The speaker is not only preparing to travel. He is rearranging his inner life so that it can travel with him. A tent also implies open air, so the interior is being fitted out for the outside.
The poem is significant for what it declines to do. Leaving is easy to treat as high drama, and a name like Rimbaud's might invite that. Instead the poem offers a version of courage that looks like preparation: a calm, slightly wary tallying up of what is owed and what is feared. Naming a historical figure in the title lets the poem stay spare, because the reader supplies the larger story, and the lines concentrate on the moment before the first step. The poem is also honest in a quiet way. The calm is borrowed, the fear is still in the hand, and the tent is not a house. The resolve it records is real but provisional, and that makes it more believable.