Six short lines, no punctuation, and the speaker is already addressing the tableware. Dave Bonta's "Too rich" opens with a grand, almost operatic cry, "O plate O my wrong spoon", and then lets the grandeur drain into something smaller and sadder. The poem is about a failing capacity: the speaker can no longer take in what once came easily. The poem never says whether the cause is age, weariness, grief or a change of heart, so the reader has to decide what is being refused. What it does make clear is that the problem is not only the food and drink. It is also the speaker's own part in supplying them.
The first stanza sets up a comic-tragic double tone. Calling on a plate with the lofty "O" is mock-heroic, the way someone might address a ruined city. But the spoon is "wrong", and that small domestic complaint carries a larger unease. Perhaps it is the wrong utensil, or perhaps the whole act of eating has gone out of true. The next line turns plain and quiet: "I cannot eat as we used to." The pronoun "we" lets in an absent past, a shared table or an earlier version of the speaker, and the poem never says which. Then comes the strangest phrase, "the evils I order for dinner". We expect "dishes" or "meals", and "evils" jolts us. The speaker chooses them, so the harm is self-inflicted. "Order" also works two ways, as a request to a waiter and as an attempt to arrange or control. The speaker keeps trying to impose order on appetite, and keeps getting evils.
The second stanza narrows to a single image, "the ice and the gin". It is cold, clear and sharp, a drink that numbs more than it feeds. Here the poem's central movement appears in the line "less and less able to bear it". The repeated "less and less" enacts the shrinking it describes, and the line trails off into soft, unstressed syllables, "able to bear it", as if the speaker's strength were running out mid-sentence. "It" is deliberately vague. It could be the gin, the evils, the memory of the old way of eating, or simply the weight of the evening.
The last line is the most surprising: "though it be light I served up". The archaic "though it be" gives the speaker a faintly formal, penitent voice. The tense also shifts. In line three the speaker was ordering in the present, and now the speaker has "served up" something in the past. The speaker is both customer and cook, taker and giver. "Light" can mean not heavy, and it can also mean illumination, the glint of light in a glass of ice. Either way, the point is that even the gentlest offering is now more than can be borne. That is what the title means. "Too rich" naturally suggests heavy food, but it also carries the idiom "that's a bit rich", meaning something hard to swallow, and a sense of too much abundance. The title is the poem's verdict, and the last line shows it applying even to lightness.
The poem's form supports this. There is no end-rhyme. The only music is made of echoes, such as "spoon" and "to" (which also chimes with the title's "Too"), and the long "i" running through "I", "ice", "light" and "I" again. Short "i" sounds in "gin", "dinner", "evils" and "it" give the middle of the poem a clipped, nervous texture. The lines are uneven, from five syllables to eight, and the rhythm lurches rather than flows. "O plate O my wrong spoon" is nearly all stress, like a chant, while "the ice and the gin" falls quickly and neatly. The lowercase line openings and the absence of full stops mean nothing is closed off, and the poem simply stops where the speaker runs out of strength.
The significance of "Too rich" lies in how much it holds in so little space. In six lines it gives a comedy of cutlery, a lament for a lost "we", a hint of self-blame, and a surprising insight: when our capacity shrinks, even what is gentle can overwhelm us. The poem does not explain itself, and that is its strength. The reader is left at the table with the plate, the wrong spoon and the half-finished drink, to work out what has gone too far.