Three times in ten short lines, a group of people tells us how much they are enjoying themselves. "A great pleasure," then "a pleasure," then, with an exclamation mark that sounds slightly desperate, "A pleasure." Dave Bonta's "Esprit de corps" is about the way a group holds itself together by insisting on good cheer, and about what happens when someone outside the group looks closely at that cheer.
The poem's structure is simple, which is why the break in it hits so hard. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only short, plain lines of free verse. Yet the first six lines work almost like three couplets, each closing on the word "pleasure." Repetition does the job rhyme usually does, giving us a chime we start to expect. The punctuation changes slightly each time: a dash after "together," a dash after "guns," then an exclamation and a full stop after "rain." The dashes make "a pleasure" sound like an afterthought, a verdict stamped on the experience. By the third round the word has been repeated so often that it begins to sound like a slogan or a mantra. When something has to be said that often, we start to wonder whether it is true.
The images undercut the praise. Going "into the thorn" is not an obviously pleasant thing to do. It suggests a thicket or bramble, something that scratches and holds on. The "dark and rain" through which the ship plunges is just as hostile, and the speaker's "How the ship went through" has the breathless energy of someone recalling an ordeal as an adventure. Even the breakfast is oddly worded: it is prepared "for thirteen guns." The people have become their weapons, a figure of speech that turns a crew into a unit of firepower. It also makes the group sound anonymous and military, and "thirteen" may carry a faint whiff of bad luck. Notice also the verbs. The group "went into" the thorn, the ship "went through" the storm, and then the group "entered into a dispute." The same forward motion carries them from outer hardship to inner conflict, as though a quarrel were just the next thicket.
That shift arrives at line seven, where the refrain disappears and a colon replaces the dashes. A "guard" turns up "to examine our mirth." The word "mirth" is the poem's second word for happiness, and it sounds more fragile than "pleasure," a thing that can be inspected and found lacking. The last line, "with our most abominable lodging," is syntactically slippery. It is not clear whether the guard is judging the mirth against the terrible lodging, or whether the lodging is simply what the group is stuck with while being examined. That ambiguity is useful. "Abominable" is the first openly negative word in the poem, and it arrives only after the cheerful voice has been interrupted by authority. The poem also stops without a full stop, leaving the dispute, the guard and the lodging unresolved.
Judging by the diction ("guns," "guard," "lodging"), the language feels like something from an old journal or travel account, a voice stiffly recording events and trying to put the best face on them. The poem does not tell us where this voice comes from, and it doesn't need to. What matters is the gap between what is said and what is shown.
That gap is what makes the poem worth reading. The title, a French phrase for the shared spirit of a group, sounds like praise, but the poem shows how this spirit can work as armor. The group says "pleasure" the way people say "fine" when they are cold, wet and short on sleep. The refrain protects them until an outsider arrives, and then their own word for happiness changes into "mirth" and the real conditions come out. In ten lines the poem manages to be funny, a little sad and quietly suspicious of the very loyalty it names. It suggests that togetherness can be sincere and still be partly a performance.