A good day, in the world of this poem, is a bad investment. Dave Bonta opens with a flat, almost bookkeeping statement, "a pleasant day is worth little / to the lords of chance", and everything else grows out of that cold valuation. The title tells us who these people are: speculators, those who stake something on what might happen. The poem never says whether they are gamblers, traders or something broader, and that openness helps it. What matters is their attitude. Anything calm and settled is worthless to them, and by the end they are left with "no beauty" and "no other mirth."
"Lords of chance" is a sly piece of irony. A lord commands and owns, but chance is exactly what cannot be commanded, so the title is hollow. These lords rule over randomness and, one suspects, depend on it. "Worth" is also a money word, applied here to something money cannot buy, a day. The poem quietly shows a mind that turns everything into a price and finds a sunny afternoon almost free.
Then comes the poem's strangest picture: "that great crowd / like lousy hair dressed in feathers." The pointing "that" holds the crowd at a contemptuous distance. It is not made of faces or bodies but of hair, so individuals vanish into one scalp. "Lousy" works twice, literally for lice and in the slang sense of rotten or worthless. "Dressed" belongs to hairdressing, so the line also pictures a grubby head styled with finery. Feathers suggest plumage and display, while the lice underneath remind us what the show covers up.
The third couplet twists a familiar phrase. "Hanging one another's heads" echoes hanging your head in shame, but here nobody hangs their own head. They hang each other's, passing shame along to their neighbours. "Hanging" also carries a darker echo of the gallows. Judging by the imagery, the crowd may resemble spectators at a punishment, though the poem never says so. What follows is laughter at "a wart a red eye." With no comma between them, the two blemishes tumble out in one breath, a quick list of things to point at. Their only amusement is the flaws of other people's bodies.
The form supports this bleakness. There are four couplets, no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation at all. Line lengths swing from the clipped "to the lords of chance" to the long, spilling "and laughing to see a wart a red eye." With no full stops to cushion anything, the verdict at the end arrives unannounced. Sound threads the cruelty together: lords, lousy, laughing, left, look all begin with the same soft "l." The last couplet slows down on the repeated "no" of "no beauty left to look upon / and no other mirth." The slightly old-fashioned "mirth" and "look upon" give it the tone of a sentence being pronounced. The final line is short and shuts like a door.
The poem's significance lies partly in what it does with a single word. "Speculator" comes from a Latin root connected with watching and looking out, and the poem ends on looking: nothing left "to look upon." That connection is my inference, not something the poem states, but it fits. People who live by watching for chance, the poem suggests, lose the ability to see anything worth watching. In twelve or so lines it ties a culture of risk to a poverty of perception. The cost is not only money but delight, the capacity to enjoy a good day for itself. Bonta gives no moral and no rescue, only a crowd laughing at warts, and leaves readers to decide what they would put in its place.