A king gives everything away, and the poem makes it sound both generous and a little ridiculous. In ten short lines he hands over his sons, his countries, his family and his ceremonies, and then, in a lurch from the grand to the bodily, his neck and his left leg. The final simile turns the whole performance into a dinner: the king is "a ham made to do / in lieu of lobster." Power is being served up as food, and a poor substitute for the real thing.
The poem begins with a puzzle. "The king, holding us / in his arms, laying / down on a chair" could describe a king who lies back while cradling us, or a king who lays us down. The grammar won't settle it, and "laying" is itself slightly off, since standard English would say "lying." That small wobble matters. We can't tell who is resting and who is being laid out, as if for a meal or a burial. The same uncertainty hangs over "us." We might be subjects, children, dinner guests or readers. We are held like infants and then fed like guests, which makes the king's tenderness feel close to consumption.
The verb that finally arrives, "breaks open," gets a line almost to itself, and the delay gives it weight. Breaking open suggests cracking a shell or splitting bread, and the whole gesture faintly recalls a ritual in which a body is broken and shared. Bonta lets that echo hover without pressing on it. What spills out is a list, and the list is the poem's most carefully built part. It starts with "sons and countries," where heirs and territories sit side by side as if they were the same kind of property. It moves to "his family, his ceremonies," the institutions that make a king a king. Then it drops, with the repeated "his," to "his neck and his left leg." The movement runs from public to private to purely physical, and the specificity of "left leg" is what makes it funny. A king who owns countries is reduced to a joint of meat with a particular limb.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. The short lines make the king's self-sacrifice feel halting, a handing-over in pieces. The last line is the longest and the most relaxed, and it works as a punchline that the earlier lines have been preparing. Its sounds do some of the work too. "Left leg," "like," "lieu" and "lobster" all carry an l, so the ending slides together with a lazy, almost greasy smoothness. Even the idiom is humble: "made to do" is the language of making do, of improvising with what's in the cupboard.
The title, "Substitute," opens up the joke. Lobster is the luxury item, and ham is what you serve when you can't afford it. But "breaks open" is what you do to a lobster, not a ham, so the king seems to be playing the role of something grander than he is. The question is who or what he is standing in for. He might be a stand-in for a real sacrifice, for a father's love, or for the dignity the ceremonies promise but can't deliver. The poem doesn't answer. It lets the king's gift sit there, lavish in quantity and shabby in kind.
That is why such a small poem is worth reading closely. It compresses a whole attitude toward authority into one sentence: rulers offer us everything they have, and it turns out to be their body, their family and their rituals, all of it carvable. The tone stays deadpan throughout, with no outrage and no explanation. Whether the king is a figure of pathos or of satire is left to the reader, and the poem seems to enjoy being both at once.