A king's head on a plain man's shoulders belongs in a fairy tale or a nightmare, and Dave Bonta sets it down in the first two lines without a word of explanation. "I was the same plain man / with a king's head": everything hinges on "same." Something has changed, yet the speaker insists the change went no deeper than the neck. Rank, the poem suggests, is something worn on top, like a crown or a mask, while the body underneath carries on as before. The title, "Social climbers," then adds an irony. If this is climbing, it has taken the speaker only a head's height.
The form is quiet but deliberate. There are four couplets, eight lines, no rhyme and no punctuation at all, and no capital letter after the opening "I." With no full stops, the line breaks do the work of commas and the reader has to pace the poem themselves. Most lines are short, between three and six syllables, which gives a clipped, deadpan delivery, as if the speaker were reporting rather than complaining. The exception is the fifth line, "but my lady would not suffer me to go," which runs to eleven syllables, nearly double its neighbours. It begins with a refusal and then drags that refusal out. The break after "go" holds the speaker at a threshold for a moment before "into the garden" names the place he is denied.
The poem's central images come from the kitchen, not the court. "Ordinary as meat / at a cook's house" is a wonderfully flat simile. In a cook's house meat is the one thing there is plenty of, raw material waiting for someone else to work on it. The speaker is common stuff, to be handled and transformed. Put a head beside the meat and the picture turns uneasy, especially once "feast" arrives in the last line. Who is being prepared for whom? That is an inference rather than something the poem states, but its vocabulary invites the question.
Then comes the lady. "My lady" and "suffer me" borrow the language of courtly devotion, an old-fashioned register in a poem that is otherwise plain-spoken. The grandeur of the diction rubs against the ordinariness of the man, and the result is both comic and a little sad. She permits and he waits. The garden also gives the title a second meaning. "Climbers" is a gardener's word for roses and ivy that scale walls, so the true climbers may be the plants inside, doing effortlessly what the man cannot. That is one possible reading, and the poem never insists on it.
The final couplet is where the irony settles. "in her hand one orange / for my feast." The orange is small, bright and round, and it is a garden fruit, so it is a piece of the forbidden place carried out to him. The gesture is generous and stingy at once. "One" and "feast" cannot sit comfortably together, and the gap between them is the poem's sharpest joke. Notice too that the stanza begins with her hand, not his. Even his meal is hers to give. A garden, a fruit and a keeper of the gate may faintly recall Eden, though here nobody is expelled. The speaker was simply never let in.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much social comedy it fits into so few words. A king, a lady, a cook and a plain man form a small hierarchy, and the speaker sits uncomfortably across all of it, with a royal head and a cook's-house body, honoured and kept out in the same breath. The poem never says whether he is grateful or bitter. That is left to the tone, and the tone comes from its smallest choices: the lengthened fifth line, the flat simile, the single orange. Reading it closely shows how a poem can say a great deal about status and dignity by trusting its images and leaving the rest unsaid.