A werewolf poem with no wolf in it: that is the first surprise. Dave Bonta offers no moon, no claws and no howling, only a bed, a hat, a house and a handful of small verbs. The title does the summoning. "Lycanthrope" comes from the Greek for "wolf" and "human being," and the seven lines that follow show how that creature might slip in through the ordinary furniture of a night at home.
On the surface, the speaker is afraid of sleeping well. That is already odd, since a good sleep is what most of us wish for, and the whole poem hangs on this paradox. The deeper the sleep, the less guard the mind keeps, and then something "goes to take / possession and / to sup." The central idea seems to be that the monster is not out on the moor but waiting at the moment consciousness lets go. Lycanthropy becomes a figure for losing control, for being occupied by something that is also yourself. The title names a person who changes, not a separate beast.
The imagery turns the usual picture inside out. We expect a mind lying in a bed, yet here the bed is lodged "in / my mind," as though sleep were a room built inside the speaker's head, a room that can be entered. Then the view swings outward to "a hat on the house." A house wearing a hat is faintly comic, like a child's drawing, but a hat is also something put on. Judging by the imagery, these lines may recall the wolf in "Little Red Riding Hood," who climbs into the grandmother's bed and wears her cap. Whether or not that echo was intended, it makes the bed and the hat feel like props for a disguise. If the house also stands for the body, then everything from the inner bed to the outer roof is being made ready for a visitor.
The construction is spare. The lines run from two to five syllables (3, 2, 5, 5, 4, 4, 2), with no regular metre and no end rhyme. The line breaks do the work instead. Two of them fall on weak, unfinished words: "A bed in" and "possession and." The reader is left hanging over a gap before the next line arrives, which feels a little like the edge of sleep itself. The last line, "to sup," is the shortest in the poem, and it closes quickly and neatly, like a jaw.
The sound is just as tightly managed. Almost every word is a single syllable, so "possession" stands out as the one heavy word. It is legal and religious at once, suggesting both owning property and being possessed by a demon, and it ends its line like a weight dropped on the page. The long "i" of "mind" and "I" links the speaker to the mind that is about to be invaded. Best of all, "sleep" and "sup" both begin with s and end with p, and only the vowel changes. Swap one sound and rest becomes feeding, a tiny shape-shift in the language that mirrors the transformation the title promises.
"Sup" is also a carefully chosen word. It is old-fashioned, with the ring of a ballad or fairy tale, and it means to take an evening meal. It is gentler than "devour," which makes it more unsettling, because it sounds like the manners of a guest. The poem never says who or what is being eaten. It also leaves "It" open. Grammatically, "It" could be the sleep or the beast that rides in on it, and the poem lets both readings stand. "Goes to take" suggests the event is imminent, almost under way.
What makes the poem significant is its relocation of horror. Werewolf stories usually belong to open country and the full moon, but here the change happens in the quietest domestic moment, with the lights out and the roof overhead. In a few dozen words, Bonta turns a legend about a body into a fear about the mind: that whatever stays awake in us while we sleep might be the thing that moves in.