Three lines of stammering, and then a sudden attack of conscience: that is the whole drama of "On Second Thought," and Dave Bonta fits it into a few lines. The title tells us what to expect, and the poem delivers it by changing its own manner halfway through.
The opening is a story told with relish. "A man, a man, a man / came from London, from London, from London / to the arms of a captain, a captain, a captain…" Each phrase is said three times, like a child's rhyme, a drumroll, or a gossip who cannot wait to reach the good part. The repetition also keeps the facts vague. We never learn who the man is, why he left London, or what the captain means to him. The speaker seems more interested in the sound and the spectacle than in the information. The phrase "the arms of a captain" is especially slippery. It could be an embrace, a soldier's weapons, or a hint of scandal, and the speaker's teasing tone invites us to pick the cheekiest meaning.
The lines also swell as they go. Counting syllables, the first is about five, the second ten, the third thirteen. Each repetition adds more words, so the lines gather speed like a rumor passing from mouth to mouth. There is no rhyme, but the poem doesn't need any, because the repeated words do the work of rhyme. Even the key nouns echo each other quietly: "man," "London," and "captain" all end on a soft *n*, which gives the opening a humming, singsong quality. The ellipsis after the third "captain" is the poem's last breath of mischief. The joke seems about to land, and then it doesn't.
What interrupts it is the final line, which is a different kind of language altogether. The chanting stops, the line stretches into long prose, and the voice becomes formal and a little stiff: "and it comes now into my mind to observe that I have been a little too free to make mirth, he being a very sober and an upright man." The small word "and" at the start makes it feel like a thought breaking in on the previous one, not a new sentence. The phrase "it comes now into my mind" is nicely passive, as if conscience were a visitor arriving uninvited rather than something the speaker chose. Judging by its diction ("make mirth," "a very sober and an upright man"), the line sounds like it belongs to an older diary or letter. If so, the poem is staging a collision between two eras of speech, the playful, chantlike mockery and the careful, self-policing voice of record-keeping.
The shape of the poem is its meaning. The first three lines are the first thought: quick, repetitive, amused. The long last line is the second thought: slow, single, and sobered. Nothing is repeated in it, as though the speaker has stopped performing and started choosing words one by one. Even the adjectives make the point. "Sober" is exactly what the earlier lines were not, and "upright" suggests a posture the speaker has now been shamed into copying. The phrase "a little too free" is a gentle understatement, and a reader may suspect the speaker is being politer to himself than the earlier mockery deserved.
There is also a pleasant uncertainty about who "he" is. It is most naturally the captain, but it could be the man from London. That blur matters, because the speaker's guilt seems to spread across everyone in the story. The mockery has been so vague that the apology cannot say exactly who it is for.
The poem is worth reading because it catches a very ordinary moral moment: the instant after a joke, when you realize it was at someone's expense. Many poems preach about kindness, but this one lets us watch a mind correct itself in real time, with a faint comedy of its own, since the apology is almost as stiff and self-conscious as the teasing was giddy. In so few lines it shows how form can carry feeling. Repetition gives us delight, and its sudden absence gives us shame.