Hardly anything happens in these six lines, and yet nothing in them is comfortable. A speaker looks at old papers and feels uneasy. The unease is compared to a "high country" where everyone is gentle but no one is on our side. Then comes a decision: "I draw / things as they are." The poem ends by welcoming the feeling it began by complaining about, "glad / that my mind is troubled." Its central idea is that honest seeing costs us our peace, and that this cost is worth paying.
The poem never says what the papers are. They could be letters, records or abandoned drafts, and the vagueness lets any reader supply their own. What matters is the simile. The jump from a desk to a "high country" suddenly widens the scale. High country suggests thin air, distance and exposure. The word "peaceable" is calm and soft, and it may faintly recall the phrase "peaceable kingdom". Then the hinge word "but" turns it all round: the people are "against us." The hostility involves no shouting and no violence, and that is what makes it unnerving. Old papers behave the same way. They sit quietly and politely, yet they can contradict the story we have told about ourselves. The pronoun also shifts. The poem begins with "me", widens to "us", and then narrows again to "I", as if the speaker steps out of a crowd to take a stand.
The form supports this movement. The lines are short, roughly five or six syllables each, with no rhyme and no regular metre. The poem moves at the pace of plain speech. It is really two sentences, and the first ends in the middle of line four: "but against us. I draw". The full stop falls inside the line, so the turn from dread to resolve happens in a single breath. The enjambment in the last two lines is also careful. "Glad" sits alone at the end of line five, and for a moment the reader wonders what the gladness could be about. Only the next line explains, and the explanation is a surprise.
Some of the poem's best effects come from word choice. "Draw" is a fine, slippery verb. It literally means to sketch, but it also means to pull something out or to draw a conclusion, so the speaker seems to be both depicting things and extracting meaning from them. Notice too how plain the phrase "things as they are" is. It is made of short, ordinary words with no decoration, so the language does what it promises. Meanwhile "trouble" appears twice, as "trouble" in the first line and "troubled" in the last. Without any rhyme, this echo works like one. The word is the same and the attitude has been reversed. A grievance has become a source of gladness, and the whole journey of the poem is packed into that one repeated root.
The title adds another layer. "The enemy of the good" recalls the familiar proverb that the perfect is the enemy of the good, but the poem drops the word "perfect". One way to read the gap is that the poem is not about perfection at all. The thing that threatens the good here is the peaceable surface, a tidy and untroubled version of the past, or of ourselves. To draw "things as they are" means giving up that smooth version and accepting what is rough and unresolved. The poem's gladness comes from that acceptance, and it never claims that the unease goes away.
The poem is significant for how much it does without explaining itself. It offers no comfort, no confession and no lesson, only an image and a choice. It also reverses a common assumption, that being troubled is a problem to be fixed. In Bonta's poem, a troubled mind is evidence that one is paying attention. Because the papers are never identified, readers are left to think of their own old papers, and of what they might prefer not to see.