Four short lines, and almost all of them are a choice between two times of day. In the morning, the speaker is "up early / to the morning well", doing something physical and ordinary. At night, someone makes "an abstract tract", and the speaker hates the result. The poem never argues that concrete things are better than abstractions. It sets a well beside a treatise and lets the reader feel the difference.
The title, "No ideas but in things", is a quotation, and it tells us what the poem is testing. The phrase is best known from William Carlos Williams's *Paterson*, where it works as a slogan for a poetry that gives up vague thinking in favour of the solid, visible object. Dave Bonta's poem takes that slogan and tries it out in a few lines. The bluntest evidence is in the word choice. The only real noun in the first sentence is "well", and the only idea in the poem arrives through that well, not through any explanation.
The construction is lean to the point of rudeness. The opening sentence has no subject and no verb: "Up early / to the morning well." It reads like a note jotted down or a half-remembered movement, as if the body got there before the mind could narrate it. Only in the third line does an "I" appear, together with the poem's single strong verb, "hate". The syllable counts run roughly three, five, six, three, with no rhyme at line ends, so the poem sounds like speech. The short lines still create pauses. The break after "Up early" makes us wait, and the break before "made at night" lets the dislike land before we learn what bothers the speaker about the tract.
The sound does much of the arguing. "The morning well" is soft and open, with its m, n and l sounds and its long, rounded vowels. Then comes "abstract tract", a lump of consonants that is awkward to say: b-s-t-r-c-t, then t-r-c-t. The phrase is clumsy on the tongue, and that seems to be the point. There is also a joke in the spelling, because the word "abstract" already contains "tract" inside it. The phrase is a word that has swallowed itself, which is a fair picture of thinking that goes round in circles. A "tract" is also a pamphlet, usually a preachy one, so the speaker's scorn has a faint tone of sermon-hating. The poem is itself a tiny tract, but a funny and self-aware one.
The imagery works through contrast. The well is a thing you lower something into and draw something up from. The word "abstract" comes from a Latin verb meaning to draw away, and I find it hard to ignore that the poem sets drawing water against drawing away. The one pulls you toward the world, and the other pulls you out of it. Morning light, cold water and early rising are physical and shared, while "night" is where abstractions get made. Judging by the poem's wording, night suggests tiredness, fog and private brooding. The final word, "night", also closes the poem with a hard t, like a door shutting on that kind of thinking, and it reverses the movement of the first line, which began in early morning.
The poem has a mildly comic honesty as well. "I hate" is a surprisingly strong phrase for a poem so quiet, and it keeps the manifesto from becoming solemn. The speaker does not claim to be wise, only to have preferences, and that gives the poem its charm. It also invites a challenge. The statement "I hate an abstract tract" is itself a little abstract, and the poem knows this. It stays on the right side of its own rule because it keeps the feeling tied to sound, to the well and to the hour.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It shows that a poetic principle can be demonstrated in a few moments, not just stated. It also reminds a school reader that a concrete image does not have to be a lesser form of thought. The well says its idea without telling us what the idea is, and that is exactly what the title promised.