Dave Bonta's "Replete" opens with a joke that isn't quite a joke. "Full of myself" is what we say about someone insufferably vain, and the poem's first move is to take the insult and hand it to everyone: "is how we all are." The title pushes the phrase somewhere older and stranger. To be replete is to be filled to satiety, and the three scenes that follow ask what that fullness amounts to once it is followed to its end.
The first scene is the oddest. "A boy that died / being dried in an oven / lies there entire in a box." The poem gives no context, so we can't know whether this is a specimen, a fairy-tale cruelty or something invented, and the flat, matter-of-fact telling makes it more disturbing. What matters is the word "entire." The boy is whole, complete and perfectly contained, which is a grim way of being full of oneself. He is also literally dried out, emptied of moisture. Fullness and emptiness sit in the same body.
The king repeats the pattern with power in place of a child. He is "quite out of ink / and weary of everything." Ink is what a monarch signs and decrees with, so running out of it is running out of authority. Yet "weary of everything" is also the weariness of someone who has had too much, who has taken in the whole world and can stomach no more. The king is replete in the sense of overfed, and the casual "quite" gives him the tone of a tired aristocrat. Both boy and king belong to a fairy-tale register, and they could come from the same story. The poem's one small hint of narrative is that they sit at opposite ends of the social scale and arrive at the same stillness.
Then the pronouns narrow. We start with "we all," move to "a boy" and "the king," and end with "me": "how rain put me / into my good night." After the oven and the empty inkwell, the speaker's ending is gentle. Rain does the putting, the way a parent puts a child to bed, and the water that the boy lost returns as something soft. The phrase "good night" is a bedtime farewell, but it also recalls the "good night" of Dylan Thomas's famous poem about dying, so it works as a quiet word for death. The possessive "my" matters too, because it makes the ending something each person owns.
Formally, the poem is spare. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, and the short lines of two to four stresses read almost like speech. The whole poem is effectively one sentence. It begins with a statement and then hangs three "how" clauses from it, so the repeated "how" works like a list of evidence for the opening claim. Sound does more of the binding than rhyme. "Died" and "dried" are one consonant apart, and the near-echo links death to desiccation. The "-ing" sounds of "being," "ink" and "everything" thread the middle stanzas together. The ending is two stressed monosyllables, "good night," which land like a door closing. Short, plain words are doing the heavy work, and the quiet delivery keeps the poem from feeling melodramatic.
The poem is significant for how much it asks of such a small space. It takes an everyday idiom for self-importance and shows it as something closer to a universal fact. Everyone is a sealed, finished container of a self, and every container is eventually put away, whether in a box, in a lack of ink or in the rain. Nothing is explained, and the strangeness of the boy and the king resists a tidy moral. What the poem offers is a mood, a mixture of dry humour and tenderness. Being "full of myself" is faintly ridiculous, but it is also what makes the final "good night" feel like a loss. The poem lets both be true without choosing between them.