We usually picture a miser as a gleeful figure counting coins by candlelight. Dave Bonta's six lines in "Miserly" take the glee away and leave what lies underneath: shame, heaviness and fear. The word of the title never appears in the poem itself. It sits above the lines like a label pinned on the speaker by someone else, while the poem gives us the view from inside, where nobody feels like a villain, only cornered.
The first stanza has no subject. "afraid to be seen / going up the back stairs / with a crow for a hand" is a fragment, a phrase hanging in the air with no "I" to anchor it. With no capital letters or punctuation, it feels furtive, almost whispered. Fear arrives before the person does. Back stairs are where secrets travel, so the picture is of someone sneaking about, presumably in their own house, since the second stanza brings in a bed. Then comes the strangest image, the crow for a hand. The poem does not explain it, but the associations are easy to feel. A crow is black, a scavenger, and in folklore a collector of shiny things. A crow's foot is also a claw, so the hand becomes a talon that only grasps. And a hand that has turned into a bird is no longer quite under its owner's control. The speaker is ashamed of what he is turning into, and he is afraid to be seen with it.
The second stanza answers by turning the whole body into an object: "I am heavy as a shut door." The hand has become a crow, and now the self has become a door. The sound helps. "Shut door" is two stressed syllables pressed together, and you can hardly say it without feeling a slam. A door exists to keep others out, so a person who is a door has become his own barrier. "Heavy" suggests both the weight of such a thing and the weariness of carrying it. The poem seems to say that hoarding slowly makes you less human, a creature and then a fixture.
The last two lines are the most quietly devastating: "all I have is my gold / and a bed full of fear." "All I have" sounds at first like a boast, the miser's pride in his one treasure. The word "and" quickly ruins it by putting gold and fear on the same inventory, as if they were two items of equal value. The bed is where we expect rest, warmth, perhaps another person. Here it is full, but of fear, which leaves no room for anyone else. The poem does not say whether the gold is in the bed too, but the lines allow the thought, and it is a bleak one: a man lying awake on his wealth.
The form is as tight as the character. The poem is free verse with no rhyme, and its lines run a steady five to seven syllables, so the pace never relaxes. Without punctuation the poem never lets out a breath. The line endings (seen, stairs, hand, door, gold, fear) are almost all single, weighty syllables that land like footsteps on those back stairs. Small echoes do some of the work that rhyme would. The long "o" of "door" returns in "gold," tying the shut door to the thing it guards, and "seen" at the start faintly anticipates "fear" at the close. The poem is also bracketed by the same emotion, since it begins with "afraid" and ends with "fear." Nothing in between offers relief, and the structure becomes a small closed room.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It takes an old, almost fable-like type, the miser, and refuses to moralise about him. We are not told that greed is wrong. We are shown what it feels like from within, which is frightening, lonely and physically heavy. The surreal images make that feeling concrete without any explanation. There is also a fitting irony in the poem's own economy: it is miserly with words, spending only forty or so and wasting none. Its argument is that the real cost of hoarding falls on the hoarder, who ends up locked in with his fear.