Nobody in Dave Bonta's "Hillbilly" explains what a hillbilly is. The speaker calls himself "a stone in a dish of peas," and the picture does the rest. A stone is round like a pea, so at a glance it can pass for one. But it is grey and hard and inedible, and the first person to bite down will find out. That is the poem's central idea in miniature: being marked as an outsider by people who have already decided what belongs on the plate. The title is the label the town has already applied, and the poem shows what it is like to wear it.
The grammar is worth noticing. The opening phrase hangs in front of "I," so the comparison is attached to the speaker with no "like" or "as." He doesn't say he is similar to a stone; he is one. Then comes the plainest sentence in the poem, "I have come far," and it quietly works on two levels. A stone in the peas has literally travelled, from a field or a hillside to a dinner table. A person who has come from the hills into town has travelled too, perhaps in distance, perhaps in the social sense of "come a long way." The tone is neither boast nor complaint, and that flatness is what gives the line its dignity.
The diction sharpens when the town appears. Almost every word in the poem has a single syllable, so "Ladies" and "freely" stand out as the only longer ones, and both belong to the onlookers. "Ladies" is a polite, slightly polished word, which makes the behaviour it describes more pointed. These women look "freely," without embarrassment and without restraint, as though the speaker were a window display. "Up and down" is the classic appraising once-over, from shoes to hat.
Then the poem repeats that phrase and changes what it means. "And some walk / up and down the town": the movement of the eyes becomes the movement of the legs. The line break leaves "walk" briefly alone, like a pause in a stride. One possible reading is that the speaker hears a second meaning in the phrase and a faint edge in "ladies." Another is that he notices the women are doing what he is being accused of, going back and forth in plain view, on display in a small town. The echo makes watchers and watched look a little alike. It also brings the poem's one clear rhyme, "down" and "town," which lands like a chime or a bit of gossip repeated.
Sound works more quietly elsewhere. "Peas," "freely" and "me" share a long *ee* vowel across the first four lines. It isn't rhyme, but it means the speaker's "me" sits inside the same sound as the peas, a stone surrounded by them even in the music. The lines are short and uneven, from seven syllables down to three and back up again, with no regular metre. The shortest, "and some walk," is also the most hesitant.
The ending carries the most weight. "Which makes me think" is vague on purpose. "Which" could point to the staring, the walking, or the whole scene, and the poem never says what the thought is. The one who has been treated as an object, the least thinking thing imaginable, ends as the poem's thinker. He is no longer just looked at; he is looking back and drawing conclusions. By withholding those conclusions, the poem avoids anger or a lecture, and the reader has to supply them.
That restraint is much of what makes the poem significant. In seven lines it takes a stereotype and gives it an inner life without announcing that it has done so. It also implicates us. We have opened a poem called "Hillbilly," and in doing so we have started looking up and down at the speaker ourselves. His last line asks what that makes us think.