We usually talk about being alone as something that happens to a person. Dave Bonta's "Solitary" suggests it can be something a person does well, and the speaker says so with a straight face and a sly smile at once. In six short lines he calls himself a king, a contented fish and a reader. Then, almost as an afterthought, he reveals what the poem is really about: how he feels about other people.
The title is worth pausing on. "Solitary" can describe someone who simply likes being alone, but it also recalls solitary confinement, a punishment. The poem never says which meaning it intends, and the speaker clearly sounds like a man who chose his condition. Still, the word leaves a faint question hanging over his happiness.
The first line, "all alone I am king of the yard," is funny because of the gap between its two halves. "King" is a grand word, "yard" a small, domestic patch of ground. The phrase has the sing-song bounce of a playground game of king of the castle, so the speaker's self-coronation sounds a little boyish and self-mocking. Even "all alone" feels playful. The two words say nearly the same thing twice, and the sound of "alone" seems to contain "all one," as if solitude meant being whole rather than being left over. That may be an accident of sound, but it fits the poem's mood.
The line break in "I am content / as a fish" does a lot of work. "I am content" is a complete, calm statement. Then "as a fish" arrives, replacing the familiar "happy as a clam" with something cooler and stranger. A fish is silent and wordless, wholly at home in its element, and has no idea it might be lonely. The simile makes contentment sound less like an achievement than like a state of nature. "Content" also happens to be spelled like the word for what a book holds, a hint of what the second stanza will bring.
That stanza begins with "and," as though the speaker were adding a second item to a list of reasons for his happiness. The "company of letters" is a neat paradox, since company normally means people. "Letters" can be the characters on a page or correspondence, and the poem lets both meanings sit together. Either way, the speaker's companions are written, not spoken, and they ask nothing of him.
Then comes the poem's quiet turn: "I do not find people / so wanting." The sentence is a litotes, an understatement that says less than it means, and it is carefully hedged. He does not say people are wonderful, only that they are not *so* wanting. "Wanting" works two ways: lacking, as in found wanting, or desiring and needing. People may seem less deficient to him, or less needy. The poem leaves open whether he is generous because books have fed him or only because he no longer has to sit in a room with anyone. That wry honesty keeps the poem from sounding smug.
Structurally, the poem is two tercets with no rhyme and no punctuation, and it begins in lowercase. What holds it together is parallel shape. Each stanza opens with a longer line, then trails off into two short ones, and each tucks a qualifying phrase into the last line ("as a fish," "so wanting"). The first line tumbles along with a light beat, and the shorter lines slow it to a hush, like someone settling into a chair. The vocabulary is almost entirely one syllable: *all, alone, king, yard, fish, find*. Against that plainness, the few longer words, *content, company, letters, people, wanting*, stand out, and they name the poem's real concerns.
The poem is significant because it takes a subject that is often sentimental or sad and handles it lightly, without announcing a lesson. It lets solitude be pleasant, gives reading the status of real companionship, and still admits a trace of ambivalence. It is also telling that the last word is "wanting," a word of need. The king of the yard, content as a fish, ends on a word that quietly admits he may not be entirely self-sufficient.