An anthem is supposed to be loud, shared and sure of itself, the kind of song a crowd stands up for. Dave Bonta's seven-line poem takes that expectation and turns it inside out. The title, "Anti-anthemic," promises a rejection of all that grandeur, yet the first line confesses the opposite: "I hear my own anthem." The poem is about where a private, truthful music might actually be found. It isn't in a stadium or a hymnbook. It's in the grumbling of leaves and the old complaints of a dog.
The first image is carefully chosen. Leaves have a "discourse," a stiff, almost academic word for what is really rustling. The mismatch is funny, and it also gives the leaves a personality, since they seem to be holding a long, opinionated debate. They are "full of ill humors," which can mean simply that they are in a bad mood. But "humors" also belongs to old medicine, where the body's temperament depended on four fluids, blood among them. So the phrase quietly gives the leaves a body that can be unwell. The word "leaves" may even hint at pages of a book, though that is more suggestion than certainty. Either way, the speaker's anthem is made from irritable, imperfect speech.
The second stanza brings in "the complaints / of my old black dog." Again there is a double meaning, because a complaint can be a grumble or an ailment. Every adjective points toward age and darkness: "old," "black," and a dog that grumbles rather than barks. The phrase "black dog" has also long been used as a name for low spirits, so the poem may be hinting at melancholy, though the text never says so outright. What it does say is that the speaker finds this gloom companionable and even sacred.
That sacredness arrives in the last stanza: "his call blessing the blood / like a true howl." "Blessing" is church language, and it fits the word "anthem," whose roots lie in sacred song sung in response. The dog's call is a kind of response too, and the poem sets up a quiet call-and-answer between animal and listener. The blessing lands on "the blood," the bodily, mortal part of us, and it echoes the "humors" from the first stanza. The "true howl" is the poem's hidden argument. If a howl can be true, then other songs, such as official anthems, can be false. The dog doesn't perform; it just cries out, and the poem treats that as worth more than ceremony.
The form supports this argument. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and the stanzas shrink from three lines to two and then two again, as if the poem were settling down. The lines are short and uneven, closer to speech than to marching verse, so the rhythm refuses the steady beat an anthem would need. The sound-patterning is subtle. The letter l runs through the poem like a low hum in "leaves," "full," "ill," "old," "call," "blessing," "blood," "like," and finally "howl." By the end the poem's own music has become the dog's. The last stanza is also a fragment hanging off the earlier lines, with no "and" and no full stop, so the poem ends like a howl fading out rather than a song resolving.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It starts from a joke about a title and ends in something close to reverence, without ever raising its voice. Its idea is that what we feel to be our own song may be found in the least dignified places, such as irritable foliage and an aging pet, and that the ill-tempered, failing, bodily side of the world deserves a blessing. The poem asks us to listen for belonging in what is honest rather than in what is impressive. After reading it, a rustle in the trees or a dog's low complaint might sound a little more like music.