Dave Bonta's "Gifts" is a shopping list that ends somewhere nobody expected. A husband comes home to his wife with presents, and for five lines we think we know what kind of poem this is. Then the last line arrives and the whole pile of treasure shifts under our feet.
The list is built to escalate. It starts with things you could actually carry: a friar's coat, "a most fine cloth and a rich lace." Even here the mix is odd, since a friar's coat is a plain, humble garment and lace is a luxury. Then the gifts stop being objects. "Troubled money" is money with some worry or stain attached to it. The poem doesn't say whether it was hard-earned or ill-gotten, so we are left to guess. "A kind mouth" is stranger still: a kindness, or perhaps a person, reduced to a single feature, and certainly not something you can wrap. The last item, "a ship and a captain coming from sea," is plainly impossible to bring home to anyone's wife. Each item is bigger and less giftable than the one before, so the speaker's generosity swells into something close to a tall tale.
The final line then changes the meaning of everything before it. "To look after her little bitch, which was just a-whelping" is an infinitive that swings back over the whole list. Read one way, all these riches were gathered in order to tend a pregnant dog, which makes the enormous gifts wildly out of proportion to their purpose. Read another way, the dog is the real gift, the speaker's care for something his wife loves, and the coat and lace and ship are showy decoration around it. The poem doesn't choose between these readings. The phrase "the loveliest that ever I saw," tucked behind a dash, adds to the puzzle. It could describe the ship, the captain, or the coming puppies, and the dash leaves the pointing finger unattached.
The sound of the poem helps the joke along. It doesn't rhyme and it has no strict meter, but the first five lines settle into a steady beat of roughly eight syllables, held together by the repeated "a... and a..." pattern. That evenness gives the list a calm, listing-off confidence. Then the sixth line breaks the pattern. It runs to about fifteen syllables, nearly twice as long as the others, and it tumbles out as if the speaker has gone on talking past the point where he should have stopped. The language is short and plain, mostly one-syllable words ("took," "wife," "coat," "cloth," "lace"), with small touches of alliteration, such as "captain coming" and "little bitch." The archaic "a-whelping" gives the whole thing a rustic, folk-song flavour. Judging by this diction, the speaker seems to belong to an older, earthier world than ours, though the poem gives no further clues about when or where.
The word "bitch" is worth a second look. Here it is simply the right word for a female dog, unsentimental and practical. But a modern reader also hears the insult, and the poem lets both meanings hum quietly without leaning on either. Set beside a wife and a husband's list of gifts, the plain word picks up a faint edge of comedy, and perhaps of tension.
What makes the poem significant is how much it gets out of six lines. It is funny, but the joke raises a real question about what a gift is. Is it value, effort, scale, or attention to what the other person cares about? The title promises a lavish haul, and the ending suggests that the thing that counts may be the small, unglamorous task of looking after a dog in labour. The poem also shows how much the order of information controls meaning. Move the last line to the front and the mystery disappears. Kept at the end, it turns a boast into a puzzle and leaves the reader still deciding what the speaker actually brought home.