Five short lines are enough for Dave Bonta's "Ratted Out" to stage a small comic drama: a household enjoys itself while a hunt goes on nearby. The opening promises refinement. "After dinner come several lush lutes" sounds like a banquet in an old tale, with music drifting in as the plates are cleared. Then the poem drops, in a few quick steps, from the lute to the floor, and from the floor to a hole.
The syntax of the first line does some of this work. "Come several lush lutes" puts the verb before its subject, an archaic inversion that makes the evening sound formal and slightly storybook. The sounds are thick to match. The l's in "several," "lush" and "lutes" slide into one another, and the line ends on two heavy beats, "lush lutes," as if the music itself were settling heavily over the table. It is the most ornate line in the poem, and the rest undercuts it.
The second line is looser and more conversational: "While we were at play, my wife went to hunt." The comma after "play" splits the line in two, setting leisure against labour. "Play" can mean making music, playing games, or simply idling, and the poem doesn't choose. What it does choose is who acts. The speaker and the "we" are occupied with pleasure, while the wife, who appears only as "my wife" but does the one thing in the poem worth doing, goes out to hunt. The small word "while" hints at a mild comic reproach, or perhaps a little guilt, in the speaker's voice. That is my reading of the tone, though, not something the poem states.
The third line, "and brought her bow here," is the shortest and carries a sudden jolt. "Here" is a pointing word. It puts us in the room with the speaker and then lets the stanza break leave it hanging, so the sentence waits for its destination. The wait is the joke. We might expect a forest or a field, and instead we get "the hole of a fleet rat / at the bottom of a bed." A bow, the weapon of kings and mythic huntresses, is aimed at a rodent's hole in a bedroom. The mock-heroic scale is funny, but the picture is also slightly unsettling, because the wildness the hunt implies has been lurking inside the most private, comfortable room of the house.
The sound-patterning rewards a slow reading. There is no end rhyme: "lutes," "hunt," "here," "rat" and "bed" all end differently, which keeps the poem plain and offhand. But the b's in "brought," "bow," "bottom" and "bed" make a small percussive cluster, and "fleet" echoes the "lutes" of the first line in its long vowel and its t. The rat is quick in sound as well as in meaning. "Fleet" also suggests feet, and the thin line "to the hole of a fleet rat" runs lightly, almost scurrying, before the last line settles down into "the bottom of a bed."
Then there is the title. "Ratted out" normally means betrayed or informed on, and here it is made nearly literal. The rat is found out, its hiding place exposed. The phrase also invites a second thought: if someone has been ratted out, who? The poem never says. It stops at the hole, with no arrow loosed and no kill, so the title's suggestion of betrayal hangs over a scene that is still undecided. The rat's secret is out, but we never learn what is done about it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does by withholding. Nothing in the text tells us when or why it was written, so it is best taken on its own terms, as a miniature about the thin line between civilised pleasure and the animal business underneath it. The lutes and the dinner belong to one world, the bow and the rat to another, and the poem lets them meet at the foot of a bed. By ending there, it leaves the reader holding the same suspended moment as the hunter, with the bow ready and the outcome still to come.