An inventory is usually the driest kind of writing, a clerk counting what is in a house. Dave Bonta's poem begins like one and ends as something closer to a confession. In seven short lines, a list of household pleasures becomes a portrait of a person, and the person turns out to be a king, a sad one.
The opening is all nouns, and almost all of them are comforts: bed, rose, wine, fire, candle, soap. Read in order, they sketch an evening. There is rest, beauty, drink, warmth and light, and then, with a small comic thud, soap. The list doesn't climb toward a grand item. It lands on the plainest one, and that choice matters, because everything here can be held, burned, drunk or washed with. Nothing is abstract. Then the list gives out: "and many other things…". The ellipsis does real work. It admits the count can never be finished, and it softens the tone. Precise naming gives way to the vaguest phrase in the poem, "other things," as if the speaker has drifted off mid-count.
The turn comes with "Time and trouble." Until now the poem has had no verb at all, only objects sitting side by side. The first verb, "give," arrives when time and trouble become the subject, the ones with power. They hand the speaker "rain and a hat." Rain is the obvious misfortune. The hat is the ambiguous gift. It might be a small mercy against the weather, or it might be a makeshift crown, which is what makes the last line click. The poem doesn't choose, and I think it wants both. The things that once suggested ease (bed, candle, wine) are set against weather, yet something is still provided to endure it.
Only then does the speaker appear. "And I am" comes in line six, after the possessions, as if the self were the last item to be counted. Standing nearly alone, with the line break leaving us hanging on "am," the phrase sounds ready for something large. What follows is "a sad king," two stressed monosyllables that close the poem like a door. The claim is a paradox. "King" suggests ownership and dominion, while "sad" admits the kingdom is small and perishable. His realm is the inventory itself, and the one thing he cannot rule is the pair that just spoke, time and trouble. A king out in the rain may remind some readers of Lear on the heath, though nothing in the poem insists on it. Bonta's king is quieter, with a hat instead of a storm.
The form is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short, and the longest, the list, runs only a few beats. Still, the sound is tightly stitched. The long *i* in "wine," "fire," "Time" and "I" quietly links the pleasures, the passing of years and the speaker. The short *a* of "and," "hat," "am" and "sad" gathers toward the ending, and "hat" and "sad" nearly rhyme, so the final phrase feels both inevitable and a little deflated. "Time and trouble" is alliterative and evenly balanced, and it sounds like a pair of bailiffs arriving together. Even the punctuation is spare. Commas run through the middle of the list, and the ellipsis is the only mark that lingers.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. Its title promises completeness, and the poem delivers incompleteness. It suggests that who we are is partly what we love and partly what we are handed by time and trouble, and that the two can't be separated. The sadness doesn't read as self-pity. Judging by the plainness of the language, it sounds like the sadness of someone who knows exactly how much he has, and how little of it he can keep. Calling oneself a king in that situation is half boast and half joke, and the poem's tenderness lives in that mixture.