Nobody in Dave Bonta's "Philistines" gets a name, a face or even a complete sentence, yet in nine short lines the poem manages to be both a put-down and a confession. The grammar is the place to start. The poem opens on "who", a relative pronoun with nothing in front of it except the title. Read the two together and the sentence assembles itself: Philistines, who having proved to be challenged by difficult art must be against it. The reader has to complete the thought, which suits a poem about how people respond to things that demand effort.
The first stanza is a small piece of mock-logic. These people have been tested by "difficult art" and found wanting, so they "must be against it". The "must" cuts two ways. It suggests they are driven to oppose art, and it also sounds like the speaker deducing this with a raised eyebrow. The reasoning is sour grapes: I couldn't manage it, so it can't be any good. The word "challenged" has a faintly bureaucratic, euphemistic ring, as if the speaker were naming a deficiency in the politest terms available. The effect is dry rather than furious.
In the second stanza the Philistines "profess that nothing / ever is beautiful". "Proved" and "profess" echo each other, both verbs of public declaration, and the irony is that what these people prove and profess is mostly their own limits. The line break does some work too. "Nothing" sits alone at the end of its line, a moment of blankness before the sentence reaches "beautiful". Then comes the longest line in the poem, "taking themselves for ordinary people", which sprawls as if the self-satisfaction needed room. The phrase is a careful trap. The poem never says ordinary people dislike beauty. It says these people take themselves for ordinary, and use that modesty as an alibi, a way of speaking for everyone while excusing themselves from effort.
The third stanza swerves. The poem has been about "them", and suddenly there is a "me". The simile is unexpected too: not a mob or a wall, but "unpaid money". Money that is owed is a debt, and the speaker gives it a voice, "whispering to me / not to dance". The whisper is quieter and more insidious than any shouting crowd. The soft sibilance of "whispering" makes it sound like a nagging reminder that there are bills to see to and no time for frivolity. Dance is a well-chosen last word. It is bodily, joyful and unprofitable, and it is hardly "difficult art" in the sense of the first stanza. What the whisper threatens is any pleasure that doesn't pay.
The form is spare. There are three unrhymed tercets with no punctuation and no capital letters, so the line breaks do the work that commas and full stops usually do. The lines are short and light until that long line in the middle, and the poem then shrinks to its smallest unit, "not to dance", three words that stop like a foot put down mid-step. The absence of rhyme keeps the tone conversational, closer to muttered commentary than to a performance.
Judging by the text, the poem's significance lies in that shift from scorn to vulnerability. It would have been easy to end with the Philistines safely over there, mocked and defeated. Instead the final simile suggests that the philistine voice is not only other people's. It can live in the pressure of ordinary worries, the sort of anxiety about money that makes beauty feel like an indulgence. The poem doesn't say whether the speaker obeys, because it stops at the instruction. That open ending is its quiet challenge: the reader is left to decide whether to listen to the whisper or to dance.