Seven short lines, one sentence, and hardly a verb: Dave Bonta's "Courtship" fits a whole long relationship into a single breath. The speaker talks for "we two," a couple who are "ever wooing." Courtship usually belongs to the start of love, the dressed-up stage before things settle down. Bonta's couple never leaves it. They keep pursuing each other, and what they pursue each other through is a run of paired opposites. The central idea seems to be that lasting love is not harmony. It is a deliberate, continuing act of holding together things that do not match.
The first line sets the tone. "Wine and wormwood" puts the obvious emblem of romantic pleasure beside a bitter herb, best known as a flavouring in drinks like absinthe and vermouth and long a byword for bitterness. Before we even learn who is speaking, we know this courtship is not sugary. Both substances are also things you drink, take into the body and feel afterwards, so sweetness and bitterness here are part of the same intimate experience.
The sound of the poem supports this. The opening is stitched with w's: "wine," "wormwood," "we," "who," "wooing," and later "water." The words "two," "who" and "wooing" share a long "oo" that rounds the lips almost into a kiss. That may be a happy accident, but it gives the poem a murmured, close-up quality, as if the lines were spoken at very short range.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Most lines run to three, four or five syllables, which gives the poem a tapping, list-like pulse. The structure is easy to see. One pair of nouns opens the poem, a two-line statement sits in the middle, and four more pairs follow. That middle statement, "we two who / are ever wooing," is the only place with a subject and a verb. The dash after "wooing" works as a hinge. After it, the grammar becomes pleasantly open. The pairs could be what the couple woo with, what they woo about, or descriptions of the two lovers themselves. The poem never settles this, and that vagueness lets each pair work in several ways.
Take "picture and price." It might mean looks and cost, or art and money, or the image a couple presents to the world and what it costs to keep it up. "Water and fire" are elements that put each other out, yet here they share a line. They suggest passion and calm, or quarrel and comfort. "Book and song" sets the quiet, solitary written word against the shared, sung one, so thought sits beside feeling. Then comes the final pair, "heaven and bed," the sacred and the carnal.
The order of that last pair matters. The poem ends on "bed," not "heaven," so after reaching upward it lands on something low and physical. Judging by the imagery, the poem is not embarrassed by this. Bed is where the courtship lives, and heaven is not allowed to float free of it. The ascent from taste in line one to the spiritual in line seven is brought back down to the body.
Look, too, at the word that joins every pair. "And" appears five times, and "or" and "but" never appear. Nothing is resolved, ranked or chosen between. Wine does not cancel wormwood, and fire does not defeat water. The couple's closeness is built from the refusal to pick one side, which is what the title promises. Courtship is the stage where two people are still discovering how different they are, and the poem suggests that this discovery never ends.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It is tiny, but it avoids the sentimental route of calling love simply sweet, and it avoids cynicism too. It offers a list that is honest about bitterness, cost and conflict, and it still reads as affectionate. The restraint is part of the effect. Because Bonta gives us only pairs, with no explanation, we have to supply the particular quarrels and pleasures ourselves, and the poem becomes a kind of mirror. Every reader can fill the gaps between "and"s with their own version of wine and wormwood.