A word like "apothegmatic" promises weight. An apothegm is a terse, pointed saying, the kind of line you might find carved over a doorway, so the title leads us to expect wisdom delivered with a straight face. What Dave Bonta gives us is four lines that sound like advice but work more like a small trap. Read quickly, they seem to say: don't expect too much from poets, just enjoy the party. Read again, they say something sharper about how people use one another.
The first line does a lot of the work. "Only love" are the opening words, and on their own they sound grand, like a greeting-card sentiment or the title of a ballad. The next two words cut that grandeur down: "a bard," a professional teller of tales and singer of praises. Then comes the instruction, to love him "for the company and the wine." The reasons are pleasant but shallow. Nobody asks the bard for truth, or even for songs. He is valued as part of the evening, like the fire and the drink, and the word "only" quietly rules out anything deeper.
Then the poem swerves. "As a king / is a ladder to the crown" is a strange comparison, and it is meant to be. A king already wears the crown, so calling him a ladder to it makes little literal sense. The line only works if we see the king as a means, not an end. The thing truly wanted is the crown, meaning power and standing, and the man beneath it is a rung on the way up. The comparison then clicks into place. The bard is loved for the wine, and the king is loved for the crown. In both cases the person is a doorway to something else. The poem never says this is cruel or shameful. It states the idea flatly, as if describing how courts naturally work.
The construction supports this quiet coldness. The lines run five, eight, three and seven syllables, with no rhyme and no regular beat. The only punctuation inside the sentence is one comma after "wine," a small breath before the comparison. The third line, "as a king," is the shortest, and the line break after it creates a moment of double meaning. For a second we might hear "love a bard … as a king would," as though the speaker were recommending a royal way of loving. Then "is a ladder" arrives and the grammar flips, making the king the subject and the object of use. That hesitation is the poem's real engine. The reader is led into a courtly, flattering picture and then shown the mechanism under it.
The imagery moves in the same way. "Company" and "wine" belong to a table, a horizontal, shared and warm scene. "Ladder" and "crown" are vertical and belong to someone climbing alone. In the space of a line break the poem goes from the feasting hall to the staircase of ambition. The key nouns, "bard," "wine," "king," "crown," are all single heavy syllables, set against the softer, longer "company" and "ladder." Those hard stops make the statements land like coins on a counter.
The poem is also pleasingly self-aware. It is presumably the work of a poet, and it tells us to value poets only for their wine and conversation. Whether the speaker means this sincerely, mocks the people who think this way, or simply teases his own trade is left open, and I would say the poem is better for not choosing. There is even a playful irony in a "maxim" whose grammar wobbles a little by the end, as if it had sampled some of the wine it mentions.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into one sentence. In about twenty words it sketches a whole economy of patronage, flattery and appetite. It also leaves students with a question that outlasts the lines: when we say we love someone, how often is the person the ladder rather than the destination?