An anchorite is supposed to stay put. The word comes from a Greek verb meaning "to withdraw," and it names someone who retreats from the world into a fixed, enclosed life. Yet it also looks as if it has "anchor" buried inside it. The two words aren't related in origin, but the eye doesn't care, and Dave Bonta's four-line poem seems to enjoy the coincidence. His anchorite is the opposite of anchored. "How at sea he is, that monk!" The idiom "at sea" usually means lost or bewildered, and the exclamation mark could be a scolding. The rest of the poem shows it's closer to a cheer.
The poem turns at its second line. The opening is an observer's remark about a third person, "he." Then the speaker becomes an invitation: "Join with him and dine on herring." The sequence of imperatives that follows (join, dine, chant, turn out) reads like a short set of instructions for a day lived alongside the monk. The tone is hospitable rather than reverent. Herring is plain, cheap, salted fish, the kind of food that makes no claim to grandeur. Sharing a meal of it brings the monk down to the level of a neighbour, and being "at sea" turns from an insult into a literal address. The sea is where he lives, and we are asked aboard.
The poem has no rhyme, but its construction is tight. Counting syllables gives seven, eight, six, and four, so the lines narrow as they go, like a view closing down to a single point. The second line falls into a lilting, trochaic rhythm: JOIN with HIM and DINE on HERring. It has the steady swing of oars. The third line, "chant and turn out to row," puts two activities side by side, and they share a pulse. Chanting and rowing are both repetitive, bodily, rhythmic work, so the poem quietly suggests that prayer and labour are the same stroke. The phrase "turn out" adds a small detail. It sounds like getting up and showing up for work, and the sleepy early-morning feel suits a monk, though that is an inference from the wording rather than anything the poem states.
The final line, "in a brave cup," is the strangest and the best. A cup is not brave. The courage belongs to the rower, and the adjective has slipped over onto the vessel, which is how the poem manages to praise the monk without saying so directly. The image works in more than one way. A cup is a comically small boat for open water, so the picture is of someone setting out in something far too modest for the ocean. A cup is also a drinking vessel, and a reader may hear a trace of a chalice. The poem never says so, but the monk's setting makes the association hard to escape. Either way, the bravery has nothing to do with size or power. It lies in going out anyway.
The sound of the poem supports this. The first line ends on "monk" and the last on "cup," and the two words share the same short, blunt vowel. The poem begins and ends on a thud, with a quiet echo between the person and the vessel, as if the monk and his cup were one object. And "brave cup" is two stressed syllables back to back, so the poem stops abruptly, like a boat bumping against something solid.
What the poem argues, in the most compact way it can, is that withdrawal is not the same as standing still. We tend to picture hermits as fixed in place, sour and sealed in a cell. Bonta's anchorite is adrift, hungry, singing and rowing, and the poem treats this disorientation as a kind of faith. Being "at sea" means giving up the firm ground of certainty and trusting a small vessel to the water.
That is why so short a poem is worth reading closely. It takes a worn-out idiom and a title with a built-in irony, and turns both into something warm and slightly funny. It also turns a solitary figure into an invitation. For all its smallness, the poem lets us climb into the cup too.