The title wears an old-fashioned spelling, "Compleat", which recalls Izaak Walton's famous seventeenth-century book on fishing, a work associated with patience and quiet contentment by the water. Dave Bonta's six lines promise that serenity and then quietly wreck it. The speaker hands over his catch to "a pretty woman", puts his head in the water, and ruins something. By the end he is wishing himself into a crowd, far from the riverbank.
The first three lines read like a tidy sequence of actions: "I give my fish / to a pretty woman / and lay my head in the water". The tone is flat and matter-of-fact, almost like a recipe. Yet the actions make little sense together. Giving away a fish looks like a gallant gesture, perhaps even a bit of showing off. Laying your head in the water is stranger. It could be a dunking to cool off, a swoon, or a lovesick collapse, and the poem refuses to say which. The dash after "water" works like a trapdoor, and the next phrase drops through it: "which spoiled it."
Those three words are the hinge of the poem, and they are deliberately slippery. What does "which" refer to, and what is "it"? The fish, now soggy? The gift? The whole encounter? The speaker's dignity? Because the poem never settles this, every reading adds a layer of comedy. The vagueness also sounds like a person who cannot bring himself to name exactly how badly things went. "Spoiled" suggests food gone off, but it also suggests a child's word for a ruined occasion, a mood too small for the grand word "disaster".
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme, and its lines are very short. The first, "I give my fish", has four syllables, and "which spoiled it" has four as well, so the sentence of embarrassment is as clipped as the sentence of generosity. The final two lines stretch out, with nine syllables in "I am sorry that I am not at London". This is where the speaker's real feeling comes in. The repeated "I" (four of them in six lines) makes the poem intensely self-focused, and the stiff repetition in "I am sorry that I am not" has the awkward formality of someone mumbling an apology.
That apology is the funniest move. He does not say he is sorry for spoiling the gift or for troubling the woman. He is sorry to be somewhere other than London. The phrase "at London" instead of "in London" sounds slightly archaic, which fits the old spelling of the title and suggests a voice out of an earlier time, though the poem gives no way to pin that down. London here seems to stand for the opposite of the riverbank: crowds, anonymity, a place where nobody watches you make a fool of yourself.
The closing image, "to hide among the ants", sharpens this. Ants are tiny, numerous and busy, and no single one is noticed. Calling city dwellers ants makes London an anthill where the speaker could disappear. It is also a self-portrait in miniature. After the dunking, he feels so small that an ant seems a fitting size. The peaceful countryside of the angler's tradition becomes a stage for exposure, and the crowded city becomes a refuge. The poem reverses the usual idea that nature heals and cities overwhelm.
The central idea, then, is the wish to disappear after a gesture has gone wrong. It is about embarrassment, the sudden gap between how we hoped to appear and what actually happened. The poem is also quietly critical of its own ideal. A "compleat" angler should be skilled and composed, but this one gives away his only proof of success, loses control of his own head, and can only retreat in imagination.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. In about thirty words it sets up a courtly gesture, turns it into a small catastrophe, and ends on an image that is both ridiculous and oddly touching. It trusts the reader to fill the gaps, and the gaps are where the humor lives. A famous, dignified title becomes a punchline, and a few plain words capture a feeling everyone knows: wanting the ground, or the water, to take us in.