Begin with the fish, because the poem does. "Char a bass and be glad" sounds like advice handed across a kitchen table, a cousin of "eat, drink and be merry," with the same bossy imperative and the same promise that a simple pleasure is enough. The sounds are plain and satisfying. Every word is a single syllable, and "bass" and "glad" share a short, open *a*. "Char" is also the name of a fish, so the line quietly holds two fish, and as a verb it means to scorch. That faint smell of smoke matters later.
The second line breaks the spell. It swells from six syllables to eleven, as if the poem had drawn a long breath: "The pater noster yesterday; war today." *Pater noster* is the Latin Lord's Prayer, and the three soft "-ter" sounds in "pater noster yesterday" chime like beads being counted. (The same phrase is also an angler's term for a kind of fishing rig, which, if you want to hear it, ties the prayer back to the first line's fish.) Then comes the semicolon and "war today," a blunt monosyllable followed by a word that nearly rhymes with "yesterday" because it is the same word with a different front. That echo makes the swap feel mechanical: one day prayer, the next day war, with hardly any change in sound. The pairing of "yesterday" and "today" may also recall a biblical phrase about something staying the same across time. Here the pair marks the opposite, a world that has changed. There is another link too. The Lord's Prayer asks for daily bread, so eating and praying were already joined, and the war disturbs both.
The last line, "Vexed to eat, vexed to be," has the balanced grammar of a proverb with the comfort drained out. "Vexed" is an older, slightly bookish word. It means troubled or irritated, and it is also the word we use for a "vexed question," one that won't be settled. "Eat" and "be" nearly rhyme, and "to be" can hardly avoid Hamlet, though this speaker has no "or not" to weigh against it. The poem also loops back on itself. "Be glad" in the first line becomes "to be" vexed in the last, so the verb of existence turns from invitation to complaint. "Eat" returns us to the charred bass, so the pleasure that opened the poem is now a source of unease.
The poem never says why, which is its smartest move. One reading is guilt: it is hard to enjoy a meal when war is in the news. Another is more unsettling. Appetite itself involves killing and fire, and "char" and "war" are close in sound as well as in violence. These are inferences, not statements, and the poem gives no evidence for choosing between them. It also names no particular war, which lets the line work for any reader in any year.
The title, "Proverbial (6)," suggests one piece in a numbered series, and the poem plays on the proverb as a form. Proverbs are short, imperative, balanced and impersonal, and they claim timeless truth. This one is built from the same parts, but "yesterday" and "today" put it in the world of news, where truths expire. The structure follows that arc. Line one gives the old wisdom, line two shows events overtaking it, and line three delivers a verdict that is really a condition, with no lesson attached. Each line also has exactly six words, and that neat symmetry makes the middle line's disruption feel sharper.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. In eighteen words it sets comfort against catastrophe, ritual against violence, and cooking against conscience, and it doesn't preach. The contrast does the work, and the reader is left to decide whether the opening advice was naive or whether being glad over a plain meal is still worth defending. The poem leaves that question open, and it stays with you for that reason.