A gnat drowns, or seems to, in a drink, and the drinker carries on sipping. It is hardly the stuff of epic, yet Dave Bonta's twelve short lines pack in a whole small drama: a fall, an apparent death, a revival, an escape, and a reaction that is hard to pin down. On the surface the poem is about noticing, about giving a speck of an insect the attention we normally save for bigger events. Underneath, it asks what we do with what we notice.
The speaker's first move is a courteous one: "I sip around him." That "him" matters, because the gnat is a fellow drinker who has tumbled into the glass, not an "it." The speaker rearranges his own behaviour instead of fishing the creature out, and the poem hinges on this restraint. He neither rescues nor ignores. He simply waits.
The language then turns the glass into an ocean. "Flotsam" is a sailor's word for floating wreckage, and "washes against the side" gives the wine tides. The gnat is both the wreck and the survivor, so a speck is seen at the scale of a shipwreck. The line break in "pin- / prick" splits the word in two, as though even the vocabulary for smallness has to be cut down to size. The pause also stretches the "while" that the speaker lets pass.
"& sticks fast" has an offhand, diary-like tone, thanks to the ampersand, and a nice irony: "fast" here means firmly held, the opposite of quick. Then comes "Revives." It is the shortest line in the poem, a single word with a full stop, and it works as the hinge. The white space around it is the gap between death and life, and the poem gives no explanation and makes no fuss. The gnat simply comes back.
The climb that follows is built from the line breaks themselves: "Crawls all / the way up to / the rim." Each short line is a handhold. Ending the first of them on "all" makes us feel the effort before we learn the destination. There is a neat reversal here too, since our eyes travel down the page while the gnat travels up the glass. The word "rim" also rhymes with "him" from the second line. It is the only full rhyme in an otherwise unrhymed poem, and it quietly links the gnat's first mention to its safe arrival. "Wine" opens and closes the poem as well, and the long *i* sound runs on through "side" and "inspired," so the sound pattern holds the poem together like the edge of a glass.
The final lines change the tone. "Inspired," with its comma, hangs at the end of the line, and the word is a pun. To be inspired is to be moved to action, but "inspire" also means to breathe in, and "spirit" is another word for what is in the glass. Then the lines lengthen and flatten into plain, blunt words: "I down the rest of the wine / in two big gulps." The verb is the opposite of the gnat's effort, since it went up and he goes down. The comic bathos is deliberate. After the quiet drama of resurrection, the reaction is a gulp.
What exactly inspired him is left open, and that openness gives the poem its charm. One reading is that the gnat's stubbornness makes him feel life is worth toasting, so he drains the glass in celebration. Another is that he is gently mocking himself: a man claims "inspiration" from a bug's escape as an excuse to finish his drink. The mock-heroic note fits that second reading. Judging by the plural title, this is one of a group of "Barley wine poems," and barley wine is a strong ale, so the setting is one in which a drinker might feel a little philosophical over very little.
The poem is significant for how much it does with how little. It has no rhyme scheme, no elevated diction, and no lesson stated outright. Yet a gnat becomes a castaway and a survivor, and the speaker becomes a witness whose response is both sincere and funny. It shows that attention is the poet's real tool: look closely enough at something tiny, and a drink turns into a sea and a crawl up a glass into a small act of courage.