Three small scenes, one preposition, and a joke that slowly stops being only a joke: Dave Bonta's "Against solitude" packs a little emotional comedy into eight short lines. A speaker sits reading under the trees, near a sleeping dog and an old swan. The book is supposed to protect him from being alone. The only creature that takes any notice of him is the swan, and it is "against me being / so near."
Everything turns on the word "against," which appears in the title, in line four and again in line seven, and each time it points a different way. When the book is "against solitude," it is a defence, a wall put up to keep loneliness out. When the swan "is against me," the word means opposition, plain disapproval. The speaker is trying to push solitude away, while the swan, judging by the poem, seems to be guarding its own. Swans have a reputation for defending their space, and that gives the word extra bite. The poem quietly suggests that solitude is not just a misfortune to be cured. For the swan it is a possession, and the speaker is trespassing on it.
The poem's construction supports this idea. It has four couplets, no punctuation, no capital letters and no rhyme. It begins with a lowercase "a," as if we have walked into the middle of a scene. It is also a single sentence, and for most of its length it has no main verb. "A little crooked dog / sleeping," "and I reading": these are suspended participles, like a photograph in which nothing has happened yet. The first finite verb is "is," and it arrives only with the swan's objection. Calm, stillness and companionship are all described without a verb, and the first real statement in the poem is a complaint.
The grammar of "and I reading a book" is worth a second look. There is no "am," so the speaker is placed in the scene just as the dog is: dog sleeping, I reading. He is one more figure in the tableau, on equal footing with the animals, until the swan breaks that equality.
The imagery builds the contrast. The "little crooked dog" is affectionate and a bit comic. "Crooked" suggests something bent or imperfect, though the poem doesn't say how. The dog is asleep on a boat, so it is an easy, undemanding companion and makes no fuss about who sits nearby. The swan is "old," awake and wild, and it is the one that sets a boundary. A domestic animal that does not mind and a wild one that does frame the speaker's position. He wants company on his own terms, and the book offers a safe substitute for it. A real creature refuses to play along.
Sound is used lightly but deliberately. The hard b of "boat," "book" and "being" ties the poem's three scenes together. The soft s sounds of "sleeping," "solitude," "swan" and "so" give the whole piece a hush, like the quiet of a spot under trees. The line breaks matter too. After "is against me being," the pause makes the swan seem briefly opposed to the speaker's very existence. Then "so near," the shortest line in the poem, shrinks the objection to a matter of distance. It is funny and a little sulky, and perhaps slightly rueful.
The poem is significant because it is so small and still manages to turn over a familiar idea. We usually treat solitude as something to escape and books, pets and nature as ways of escaping it. Here the escape fails, and the failure comes from nature itself, which turns out to have its own wish to be alone. The speaker doesn't argue back, and the poem leaves him there, still reading, still too close. The joke is gentle and it is on him, but it also leaves a thought behind: wanting company means asking something of others, and they are free to refuse.