Drinking is supposed to be the one pastime that switches the accountant off, yet in Dave Bonta's six lines the accountant climbs into the glass. The reed of the title, presumably a drinking straw though the poem never says so, doesn't simply sip. It is "reckoning / the profits of drink." What looks like a scene of idle pleasure turns into a ledger, and the central idea lands in the final line: desire, once examined, is "quite spoiled by reason."
The title seems to be a clue. "A Drinking Reed" sounds like a variation on the famous phrase "thinking reed," which Pascal applied to human beings, frail as a reed but able to think. The poem never confirms the echo, but the wording invites it. Change one letter and the dignified thinker becomes a tippler. The poem then refuses to keep the two apart. Its reed does both at once, drinking and calculating, and that is exactly the trouble.
The imagery is sparse and slightly strange. "I fetch a friend to send to sea" never says who the friend is. It could be a companion, or perhaps the drink itself, and the poem doesn't explain. Judging by the sea's traditional pull as a place of sailors and swallowing, it may also hint at a vast liquid to be plunged into. The next line brings in a homophone: "sea" is followed at once by "see." The speaker sends and sees in a single breath, and the sound loops back on itself, which suits a poem about a mind that can't stop turning things over.
The rhythm tells its own story. The first line is a smooth iambic tetrameter, "I FETCH a FRIEND to SEND to SEA," its f and s sounds giving it the lilt of a drinking song. After that the lines shrink to roughly six syllables, then five, then six, six and five. Confidence thins out as the poem goes on, as if the opening swagger were being slowly audited away. There is no end rhyme, but the poem chimes inside itself. The r-sounds of "reed" and "reckoning" return in the very last word, "reason," so the reed's calculations already contain the sound of the faculty that will ruin the pleasure.
The diction does the same quiet work. "Reckoning," "profits" and "expect" belong to the counting-house, not the tavern. "Reckoning" also means the bill at the end of an evening, and it carries a faint echo of a day of judgement. "Vice" is a moral word, yet the question "How much to expect of vice?" is asked like an investor's, as though sin were a stock with a rate of return. Moral language has been reduced to economics, and pleasure to yield. That question is the poem's only one, and it gets no answer. The next line simply slips into the past tense: "I found." The scene is in the present, but the verdict sounds retrospective, as if the speaker had already lived through the outcome.
The last line is the most carefully weighed. "Quite" is polite, even wry, an understatement that makes the loss sound minor and so somehow sadder. "Spoiled" suggests fruit gone off or a treat ruined, and it is a surprising verb to attach to "reason," a word we usually praise. The irony is that the faculty meant to protect us from vice here spoils the desire as well, and it leaves nothing in its place.
The poem is significant for how much it compresses into barely thirty words. It is small and a little comic, but the dilemma is real. Self-consciousness can drain the pleasure from the very thing it is examining. It also declines to moralise either way. It never says vice is good or reason bad. It says only that the speaker cannot stop counting, and the shrinking lines, the unanswered question and the abrupt ending leave the reader with the same unresolved tally.