Joy is supposed to be the safe emotion, so the first thing Dave Bonta does in "Oblivious" is unsettle it. "what harm might come from joy" has no capital letter and no question mark, so it floats between a real question, a shrug and a warning. The answer comes in two words, "God knows," which work twice: as the casual idiom for "who can say?" and as a flat statement that only God does know. Then comes the admission: "how little fit we are for it." Joy, the poem suggests, is like a task we haven't trained for. We have it, but we can't carry it well.
The second stanza turns away from people altogether. "night comes into the garden / as it ought to." A garden is a human arrangement, tidy and cultivated, and night walks in anyway, without asking and with perfect correctness. "Ought" is moral language applied to the dark, and it quietly implies that night does what it should while we do not. Then the simile: "raw as all life." Raw can mean uncooked, unprotected or sore like an open wound, and the comparison covers all life, not just the evening. Nothing is softened or sentimentalised. In many accents "ought," "raw" and "all" share the same broad, open vowel, which gives the stanza a low, slow sound, like a long exhale.
The last stanza shows what "we" do with the evening. "Discourse" is a grand, faintly pompous word, and the poem deflates it at once with the plain "talking and laughing." The phrase "our own tricks" is ambiguous. It might mean cleverness we boast about, or tricks played on someone, and either way the target is "the folly of some neighbor." The vague "some" suggests any neighbor will do. The irony is that the people laughing at folly are displaying it. This is also the poem's answer to its first question. The harm that comes from joy is not catastrophe but smallness, joy shrunk into smug amusement at someone else's expense. And the title lands. The word "oblivious" never appears in the poem itself, so the reader has to supply it. While the company laughs, night has been settling into the garden, and no one has noticed.
The construction supports this. There are three tercets, no rhyme, no punctuation and no capitals, so the poem reads as quietly as a thought. The line lengths do some of the work. The middle stanza ends on two short, hushed lines ("as it ought to / raw as all life"). The final stanza opens and closes on long lines that run on like chatter, with the shorter "talking and laughing" between them. A soft l-sound threads through the poem, from "little" to "life" to "laughing" to "folly," so that the joy of the first stanza and the laughter of the last feel linked in the ear as well as in the argument.
The arrangement is also pointed. The garden stanza is the only one with no people in it, and it holds the truth the other two miss. Bonta doesn't tell us we are blind. He sets a dark, honest garden between two stanzas of human talk and lets us see the gap.
The speaker says "we," never "they." The poem's judgment includes whoever is speaking, which keeps it from committing the sin it describes, laughing from a position of superiority. That is a large part of what makes it worth reading. In eleven or so short phrases it manages a paradox (joy can do harm), a picture (the night garden), a small satire (the gossiping circle) and a self-implicating moral. It also leaves the central question open. "God knows" what harm joy might do, and the poem doesn't pretend to know either. It only shows what joy looks like when we aren't fit for it.