A title that sounds like a bandleader's order, followed by a poem that barely raises its voice. "Begin the beguine" is a command, and the guillemets suggest a borrowed phrase. It is familiar as the name of a Cole Porter song, and a beguine is a dance. The title also plays on sound, since "begin" and "beguine" are almost the same word. But Bonta's poem does not take up the glamour of the ballroom. It begins lowercase, mid-thought, with "in many hands", and it never offers a full stop.
The first four lines make one sentence, and it moves the dance somewhere unexpected. We expect feet. The speaker perceives the dance in hands, and in "many" of them, so the movement is shared and ordinary. "Perceive" is a careful word, more attentive than "see". It makes the speaker an observer who has learned to look, not a performer. What he finds is "a dance / of great use / and small trouble". That reads like praise for a good tool: it does a lot and asks little. The dance is practical, with no showing off. Judging by the wording, the hands are at work, and the poem may be quietly echoing the proverb about many hands making light work. Whether or not that echo is intended, "light" does turn up two lines later.
After that the grammar falls away. "dark and light / ice / wine" has no verb and no explanation. "Dark and light" is the poem's only balanced pair, a contrast so basic it could describe day and night, or red wine and white, or shadow moving across a working surface. Then come two single words, each given its own line. The line lengths show the narrowing. Counted by syllable, they run four, five, three, four, three, one, one. The poem tapers like a pour that slows to its last drops, and "ice" and "wine" arrive almost as drops of their own.
Those last two words are the poem's open question. They may be more examples of the "great use and small trouble" that hands can make, or a different kind of pairing, cold and warmth, hardness and its opposite. "Ice" and "wine" also sit close enough to suggest *ice wine*, a sweet wine made from frozen grapes, split by the line break into its two halves. That reading is only a possibility, but it shows what the form allows. Because the lines are so short, each word carries more weight than it would in a sentence, and the reader has to decide how the pieces fit.
There is no rhyme here and no regular metre. The rhythm is that of quiet speech, broken into small breaths. Yet sound still holds the poem together. A long *i* runs through it: "I", "light", "ice", "wine". It peaks at the end, where "ice" and "wine" share a vowel without matching fully, a half-chime that gives a sense of closing without a tidy rhyme scheme. "Dance" and "dark" share their first letter, a small echo that links the movement of the opening to the contrast near the end. And because "ice" and "wine" stand alone, each must be read slowly and given its full stress. The poem ends by making the reader pause.
What makes the poem worth a close look is how much it does with eighteen words. Its title promises a performance. The poem's own vocabulary is modest ("use", "trouble", "hands"), and it moves the dance out of the ballroom and into everyday labour and shared effort. It also teaches a way of reading. It never explains its images, so the reader has to do the work of connecting them, much as the poem finds grace in work that looks unremarkable. The title says "begin", but the poem stops on a bare, cold, bright image and leaves the reader to continue.