Five short lines, and the first four sound like a Valentine's card read aloud by someone in a hurry: "Dine me, wine me, know me and Valentine me." Then the fifth line sneezes. After all the candlelit glamour, what the speaker asks for is "a spoonful of honey / for my cold." Dave Bonta's "February romance" is a joke, but a tender one, and it carries a surprisingly honest idea: what we want from love is often less spectacle than simply being looked after.
The poem is built almost entirely from commands. Every line begins with a verb, and nearly every verb ends in "me": dine me, wine me, know me, Valentine me, please me, give me. The pronoun is repeated so often that it starts to sound like a refrain, or a child's insistent tugging at a sleeve. The speaker is greedy, but not in a threatening way. The effect is comic and a little bare, a person laying out all their wants at once. The final "my cold" is the only possessive in the poem, and it is the one claim that is entirely true and entirely small.
The sound of the poem does much of its joking. "Dine," "wine" and "Valentine" form a tight, bright chain of rhyme, and the third link is the most daring. "Valentine" is a noun, a card or a sweetheart, but the speaker turns it into a verb, as though being Valentined were a service one could order, like being dined. "Wine" is also pressed into verb duty, and the pairing makes romance feel like a menu of actions. Between these rhymes sits "know me," which is the quiet hinge of the first half. Because "know" can mean emotional understanding or something more intimate, the line lifts the request above dinner and flowers. It then slides straight back into the playful "Valentine me," so the seriousness never has time to settle.
The rhythm helps this slide. The opening lines bounce along on paired beats and a skipping run of unstressed syllables, as in "know me and VAL-en-tine ME." "Please me, give me" is shorter and blunter, and here the poem gets interesting. "Please me" can be read as a demand for satisfaction, but it also echoes the polite word "please," so the order wobbles into a plea. By the time we reach "give me," the grand imperatives have softened into asking. The line "a spoonful of honey" is gentler still, with its round, soft vowels in "spoonful" and "honey," and it feels like a lull after the clipped rhymes. Then comes the shortest line, "for my cold," which ends the poem on a flat, plain, slightly sniffly note. The rhyme scheme has promised something more, and the poem withholds it.
That withholding is where the poem's meaning sits. "Cold" works on two levels. It is a literal illness, and February is the season for it, but it is also the chill of the month itself, and perhaps of being alone in it. The poem never says so outright, but the imagery invites the reading: the speaker needs warmth, and a remedy for a stuffy head is the nearest available form of it. "Honey" adds a last twist, because it is also a pet name. Asking for "a spoonful of honey" is therefore asking both for a kitchen remedy and for someone to call you honey. A single word manages to be medicine and endearment at once.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does in so little space. It takes the most commercial, over-scripted day of the winter calendar and quietly measures it against a human need. The speaker is not rejecting romance, since the list of wants is sincere enough. But the poem suggests that the grand gestures are a kind of shorthand, and that what they stand for is something as ordinary as someone stirring honey into a cup because you are unwell. Intimacy, here, is not being taken out to dinner but being taken care of.
The poem is also funny without being cynical, which is hard to do. Its humor comes from the drop between the first four lines and the last, and its warmth comes from the fact that the drop is also a confession. The speaker has been performing the role of a person who wants romance, and the cold gives the performance away. Underneath it, the wish is small, true and easily met.