Anyone who grew up singing the nursery rhyme will hear it before reading a word. The song asks, over and over, whether you know the muffin man who lives in Drury Lane. Dave Bonta's six-line poem reads like a strange, sideways answer. It gives this figure a morning, a house and a meal, and in doing so turns a children's question into a small portrait of a life: work, shelter, food.
The first two lines are the most surprising. The speaker rose early "to barber / the moss of the wood." Using "barber" as a verb is a lovely stroke. It turns the forest floor into something with a head of hair or a stubbled chin, and it makes the speaker a gentle, fussy groomer of the wild rather than a woodcutter or hunter. Moss is soft, green and quiet, and the verb suggests care and a steady hand. "Rose early" also sounds like honest labour. Bakers, and muffin men, are the sort of people who start before dawn, so the nursery rhyme's tradesman is already hiding in these lines. The poem never says what the barbering is for, and the gap draws us in. Is this a job, a ritual, a joke?
Then the poem turns. The speaker "took a house / in Drury Lane." The short line "took a house" makes the move sound as casual as picking up a coat. The scene jumps from woodland to a named street, from something growing to something built. Drury Lane is the address the rhyme has taught us to expect, so the reader feels the poem click into place. Even so, the leap from wood to street is abrupt. Nothing explains how the same person does both. The poem seems to enjoy that logic of dreams and nursery songs, where odd things sit side by side without apology.
The syntax adds to this. The poem is one sentence, with a single full stop at the end and almost no pause on the way. After the opening "I" the subject vanishes, and the verbs carry us along: rose, took, ate. A whole life is reduced to its most basic actions. The lines are short, mostly three to seven syllables, and there is no rhyme. Instead the poem relies on quieter echoes. "Took" and "wood" share a vowel. "Moss" and "house" share a hissing s. "Drury" and "very" nearly rhyme, which gives the last two lines a faint singsong, as if the nursery rhyme were still humming underneath. The closing sounds are the cleverest. "Toasted cakes" and "crisp" are full of hard t, k and p sounds, and the final word ends the poem with a clipped snap. The sound does what the word says.
That last line, "which were very crisp," is also a deadpan anticlimax. After the odd grooming of a forest and the move to a famous address, the poem ends on a mild consumer's verdict. "Very" is the plainest of intensifiers. The speaker is simply and quietly pleased. Judging by the imagery, there is a deliberate contrast of textures here, between the damp, yielding moss at the start and the dry, brittle toast at the end. The poem moves from tending something soft to enjoying something crisp, from the wild to the domestic.
If there is a central idea, it is that an ordinary life contains its own small wonders, and that a figure we have only ever met in a song can be given an inner morning. The poem is significant for how much it does with so little: a borrowed title, a borrowed street, and a few well-chosen verbs. It shows how a familiar rhyme can be reopened and made strange without being mocked. It also leaves things unexplained, such as who "I" is, why the moss needs barbering, and what connects the wood to the lane, and that invites the reader to supply the missing story. In six lines it suggests that behind every cheerful character in a rhyme there may be someone who got up early, took a house and sat down, very contentedly, to eat.