Six short lines are enough for Dave Bonta to pick a quarrel with one of poetry's favourite words. "Against Nature" begins like a modest, slightly rueful inventory: "All the assistance I could expect." The colon promises a list, and the list is strange. It holds "the sound of an evening" and "a large desire for / my old friend, the world." Neither is help in any practical sense, since a sound can't carry you anywhere and a desire isn't something anyone hands you. Yet the speaker offers them as the whole of what was on offer, and the tone is half-wry, half-content.
The central idea arrives in the last two lines, and it lands like a small shock: "Nature is the first lie / since coming from sea." The poem turns on the difference between "the world" and "Nature." The world is an "old friend," familiar and unceremonious, something you are already inside and can simply long for. Nature, capitalised and abstract, is an idea, a category. The poem suggests that once we name something "Nature" and set it apart as scenery, refuge or consoling teacher, we have started telling ourselves a story about it. The title's "against" seems aimed at that story, not at the physical world, which the speaker clearly loves.
The final phrase is deliberately open. "Since coming from sea" most naturally points to the long history of life leaving the water, though that is an inference from the imagery, not something the poem spells out. If so, the lie is a very late arrival. For an immense stretch of time nothing deceived, and the first falsehood is the idea that we stand outside our surroundings and look at them. The missing article in "from sea" strips the phrase down to something that sounds like an origin story, and the grammar is as bare as the claim.
The construction supports this. The poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular metre, and its lines shrink as they go. The first is the longest and the heaviest with expectation, and what follows is shorter and sparer, as though the speaker were shedding hopes line by line. Two sentences divide the poem. The first, running through four lines, drifts and accumulates. It ends on the period after "the world," which works as a pause before a pronouncement. The second is blunt and declarative: subject, verb, verdict. The break at "a large desire for" is well judged too. For a moment the desire has no object, and then the next line supplies one, much as wanting reaches out before it knows what it wants. "Large" is an unexpected adjective for desire, and it makes the feeling roughly the size of the world it is directed at.
The imagery is scant, and that seems to be the point. The only concrete things are an evening and the sea, and the evening comes as a sound, not a sight. A visual evening would be a view, something to stand back from and admire, a postcard of Nature. A sound surrounds you and has no frame. The sea appears only at the end, as a point of origin and not a scene. The poem declines to describe landscape because description would commit the very offence it accuses.
The sound patterns are quiet but noticeable. S-sounds run through "assistance," "sound," "since" and "sea," so the poem opens and closes in the same hush. The long "i" in "I," "desire" and "lie" links the speaker's own wanting to the lie in the final sentence. It is hard not to hear a suggestion that desire and self-deception are close relatives, and that the speaker is not exempt.
The poem matters because it is so compact and so contrary. It takes a word we usually treat as unquestionably good and asks us to hear it as a human invention. It does this without lecturing, in a voice that sounds like someone talking about an old friend. The paradox is that a poem "against Nature" is full of evening and sea. What it rejects is the label that keeps us at a distance from the world, and a student can come away from it looking at the word "nature" a little differently.