A king in a velvet cap sounds like something from a picture book, and Dave Bonta's «Grown-up nursery rhyme» starts out as if it were one. By the last line the picture book has turned into a quiet argument about what wealth is. The speaker rules over a dubious kingdom, has closed off the source of his riches, and puts what money he has into something that grows. The central idea is that real security might be slow, shady and a little silly, and might look nothing like a vault.
The opening, "O mother, O wife," sets the tone. The double "O" belongs to lullabies and old-fashioned invocations, and it sounds both tender and a bit theatrical. The poem never says whether it addresses one woman in two roles or two different women, and that ambiguity gives the line a household warmth. Then the speaker announces his rank: "in the country of Chance I am king / in a velvet cap." The kingdom is named for luck, not land or law, so his power is that of someone who has gambled and happened to come out ahead. The velvet cap is a comic touch. It is a costume, grand enough to be a crown and homely enough to be a hat, and it makes the speaker slightly absurd, aware of his own pretension.
The central image comes in the second half. "I had a mine and sealed the thing" is flat and decisive. A mine suggests buried wealth, extraction and risk, and the speaker simply closes it up, calling it "the thing" as if it were an unwelcome object. The tenses matter here: "had" and "sealed" are past, while "save" is present. The digging belongs to an earlier life, and the saving belongs to now. What he saves "in trees" overturns the old proverb that money doesn't grow on trees, because for him it does. The investment isn't a metaphor of paper and interest. It pays out in shade, growth and time.
The poem's sound reinforces this gentleness. Its lines are short and uneven, from the five syllables of line one to the nine of line two, so the rhythm feels like speech more than strict verse. The only true end rhyme, "king" and "thing," links the grand title to the dismissive word for the mine. It is a small joke about how easily a crown and a worthless object chime. Elsewhere the music works through repetition of sounds. Hard *c* and *ch* sounds run through "country," "Chance," "cap," "cost," "keep," "company" and "children," giving the poem a nursery-rhyme bounce. The long *e* of "trees," "keep" and "company" carries the last three lines to a soft landing. The *m* of "mine" and "money" ties the two kinds of wealth together just before the speaker chooses between them.
The pun that holds the poem together is "which cost a song." To buy something "for a song" means to buy it cheaply, but in a poem called a nursery rhyme, a song is also literally what is being offered. The kings, money and songs of the title's genre come back here. "Sing a Song of Sixpence" is one rhyme the opening seems to recall, with its king counting out his money. Bonta lets the king stop counting. The trees cost almost nothing, yet they "keep / the children company," and the line break after "keep" lets that verb also mean to hold on to, to guard, to save. The trees are both the savings and the babysitters. They will stand around the children as they grow, which a sealed mine could never do.
What makes the poem significant is how much it fits into seven lines without raising its voice. It takes the childish form of the rhyme and gives it an adult subject, risk and provision for a family, and then lets the childlike answer win. The speaker is still a king of Chance and still wears his silly hat, so the poem does not claim to have beaten uncertainty. It suggests that the best answer to luck is to plant something, and that value may lie in what keeps us company rather than in what we hoard. For a reader who has grown up and been told to be sensible about money, this is a wry and affecting thing to find in a nursery rhyme.