Nobody in "Theorbo" tells us what the instrument sounds like. Dave Bonta never describes the music, the strings or the player. He gives a single sentence of praise, "A theorbo / is as good as", and then lets the comparisons pile up. The theorbo, a big, long-necked lute of the baroque age, is assessed the way a gossip might size someone up, by what it resembles and what company it keeps. The central idea is that a thing's value can be caught better through a crowd of unlikely equivalents than through a definition.
The list is a strange one. A theorbo is as good as "a captain of / a theater," "a woman in / men's clothes," "the best legs," "an alehouse," "a hit," "a hand- / some urn." Nothing links these items on the surface, yet most belong to a world of performance and pleasure. The poem doesn't state the setting, but judging by the imagery, it is a theatrical, slightly raffish one, with a stage, a cross-dressed performer, admired legs and a tavern nearby. High and low are mixed on purpose. A theater captain has status, an alehouse has noise and warmth, and the theorbo is said to be worth all of it. That makes the instrument seem less like a museum piece and more like a social presence that livens a room.
Each comparison also measures "good" differently. A captain is good through authority, and the woman in men's clothes through daring and disguise. "The best legs" is pure admiration of the body, "an alehouse" is good as a place, and "a hit" as success. The urn is good as an object. The phrase "as good as" stretches to cover rank, nerve, beauty, comfort, applause and craftsmanship, and the theorbo is made to contain them all.
Two of the items are double-edged. "A hit" can be a popular success, but it can also be a blow, or the single pluck of a string, so the one word brings sound into a poem that is otherwise silent. The final image is the cleverest. An urn is round-bellied, and a theorbo has a rounded body, so "handsome urn" may quietly describe the instrument's own shape. An urn also holds ashes, which gives the last line a faint shadow of mortality. Even so, the word the poem rests on is "handsome," a bright, social, appreciative word.
The line breaks work hard. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines run to only two or three words each, so the poem reads in short, light steps. The rhythm is the rhythm of a list, with commas appearing only after "clothes," "legs," "alehouse" and "hit," so the sentence moves on in small bursts. The shortest line, "a hit," lands almost like a plucked note. Then comes the poem's one real trick, the split of "handsome" into "a hand- / some urn." The break makes us pause on "hand," which suits an instrument played by hand, before the full word turns up on the next line. A joke about hands and handsomeness hides inside a hyphen.
The shape on the page matters too. The poem is a tall, narrow column of short lines, which looks a little like the long neck of the instrument it names, and it ends on the round word "urn" where the body of the instrument would be. That reading is an inference, but it fits how playfully the poem treats form.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It gives us no description and almost no grammar, since the sentence has one verb, "is," and the rest is a stack of nouns. Yet a personality comes through, someone confident, funny and fond of the theatrical. The poem also trusts the reader to supply what it leaves out, the actual sound of a theorbo. In that way it makes a case for how poetry works. Instead of explaining a feeling, it sets odd things side by side until a spark jumps between them, and a seemingly random list turns into a portrait of delight.