Six short lines, two tercets, and a meal that ends in sickness. Dave Bonta's "Venison" is hardly a poem about dinner, though. It starts with ordinary table talk and quickly turns into something close to a confession, in which pleasure, guilt and love all seem to curdle together. The central idea is that appetite, even the appetite to share and to give, carries a cost, and the poem's last words in each stanza, "fall sick," say what that cost is.
The first stanza is the sociable one. "We chat of fat venison" has a lip-smacking quality: the short *a* in "chat" and "fat" makes the line sound relaxed and well fed. The second line stretches out as gossip does, and it is the longest line in the poem. It is also the strangest. "That mother the other table took" is open to more than one reading. The most natural is that "mother" is a doe, the animal whose meat everyone is discussing. But the phrase could also hint at something less comfortable, a maternal figure carried off by someone else. The poem never settles it, and the ambiguity is the point. Notice, too, that "mother" and "other" rhyme, so the nurturing creature becomes literally the "other," the one that gets consumed. The line puts a gentle, domestic word beside the blunt verb "took," and the effect is faintly predatory.
Then comes the drop: "We sin and so fall sick." Every word is a single syllable, so the line lands like a verdict. The "so" is chilling because it makes sin and illness cause and effect, as in a moral fable. "Fall" also invites an echo of the biblical Fall, where eating and sin were bound together. That is an inference from the wording, but the pairing of "sin" and "fall" makes it hard to ignore.
The second stanza turns from "we" to "I," and from talk to action. "I sent my wife a pewter rose, / a venison pasty." The verb "sent" suggests distance, so the gesture of love is carried out across a gap. The two gifts are oddly matched. A pewter rose is a flower made of dull metal that cannot wilt or smell of anything. A pasty is meat baked into a pie, and the dash before it gives the line a small pause, as if the speaker were adding the second gift with some embarrassment. One gift is lasting and lifeless, the other perishable and made from a once-living animal. Love is being expressed through both an object that will never die and a creature that has. The hard *p* sounds of "pewter" and "pasty" tie the two gifts together, and the second occurrence of "venison" quietly links this private act to the shared meal above.
The final line is the poem's most memorable: "so much cold joy we fall sick." "Cold joy" is an oxymoron, and it fits neatly with the metal rose and with a pasty, a dish so often eaten cold. It suggests happiness that has lost its warmth, or pleasure that arrives with a chill of conscience. Again the line is entirely monosyllabic, and the repeated "so" at the start of each closing line makes the two stanzas feel like variations on one sentence. In the first, "we" refers to the diners, but in the second the pronoun is harder to pin down. It may take in the speaker and his wife, or everyone. Either way, the sickness has spread from the table to the household.
Formally, the poem avoids regular meter and end rhyme. Its music comes from repeated sounds: the *s* and short *i* of "sin" and "sick," the *t* of "table took," and the echo of "sick" at the end of both stanzas. This refrain-like repetition gives the poem the feel of a chant or a warning rhyme, short enough to memorise and uneasy enough to remember.
The poem matters because it does so much with so little. In under forty words it links eating, morality, marriage and loss, without explaining how they connect. The reader has to supply the logic, and that unspoken logic is what lingers: the things we offer in love may be the very things that make us ill.