In five short lines, Dave Bonta takes us through a whole day and leaves us face to face with ourselves. The poem moves from morning to afternoon to supper, and at the last moment the speaker makes a small, unsettling mistake: he looks at a person he takes to be Susan and finds that it is himself. The poem never explains the error, and that silence is where its interest lies. Its central idea seems to be that the self is not always where we expect it, and that a day, like a life, can narrow until we run into our own company.
The opening lines treat time as architecture. "Morning is a clear house" is open, bright and almost see-through, a place with nothing hidden in it. Then comes "afternoon a wardrobe," and the verb quietly drops out. The missing "is" makes the sentence shrink, and the image shrinks with it, from a house you can walk around in to a cupboard-sized space that is enclosed, dark and full of hanging things. A wardrobe is also where we keep what we put on, so the afternoon may hint at costumes, roles and the selves we wear to get through the day. If morning is transparent, the afternoon is where things start to be stored away and concealed.
By supper the poem has stopped using metaphor and turned to narrative, and the plain, almost legal diction does the work. "I looked over" is wonderfully slippery. It can mean he examined something, glanced across a table, or even overlooked it. "What I took to be Susan" rests on the verb "took," which makes the speaker's perception an assumption rather than a fact. Then "proved" arrives like a verdict, as if the poem were a small trial and the evidence had come back against him. We are never told who Susan is. Judging by the setting, she could be someone he shares meals with, or someone whose absence he feels at the table, and the poem leaves both readings open. It is also possible he sees his reflection in a darkened window, since the clear house of morning has by evening become something that gives back images. That is an inference, but the imagery invites it.
The form supports the surprise. There is no rhyme, and the lines are short and even, roughly six or seven syllables each, so the poem sounds like calm, offhand speech. The line break after "looked over" leaves the sentence hanging for a beat before the object arrives, which mimics the delay of a mistaken glance. The final line is made entirely of one-syllable words: "but it proved to be me." After the longer sounds of "afternoon," "wardrobe" and "Susan," the poem ends on its smallest words, and the last of them, "me," is the smallest of all. The speaker is reduced to a single syllable, and the deflation is both funny and a little sad.
The title adds another layer. "House of the Rising Sun" recalls the well-known folk song, whose house is associated with ruin. Bonta keeps the word "house" and the sun, but his version has no confession or dramatic downfall, only a quieter undoing. The poem runs from the rising of the day to the evening meal, so the sun in the title has already climbed and begun to fall by the time the speaker sits down. The house of the day has been walked through from its brightest room to its last.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. It turns the ordinary rhythm of morning, afternoon and supper into a small drama about identity. It also shows that a poem does not have to explain itself to be moving. The reader fills the gap between "Susan" and "me" with their own loneliness, habit or tenderness, and that gap is what the poem is about. A mistaken glance at supper becomes a way of asking how well we know the person we spend every day with, who is, after all, ourselves.