A pelt is what is left when an animal is finished with its own skin. Dave Bonta's title promises something dead, perhaps a collar or a stole, and then the poem sets a living fox against that expectation. In eleven or so words it argues that a pelt is not an accessory but the coat of a wild creature.
The first line, "daylight fox", has no article and no verb. We don't get "a fox in the daylight" or "the fox appears". The two nouns are pressed together like a note jotted down at the moment of seeing, and the poem never adds a finite verb. That absence matters. Nothing happens, because the poem is a glimpse rather than a story. "Daylight" is also doing more than telling us the time. Foxes are generally thought of as creatures of dusk and night, so a fox in full light is exposed and unhidden. The word makes the animal vivid and alive at the very moment the title has us picturing it skinned.
The second line turns on that picture: "not like a neck fashion." The phrase is blunt and slightly awkward, and the awkwardness works. "Neck fashion" reduces a fur stole to two cold nouns, as if the animal had been turned into a category in a shop. The poem rejects that reduction before it can settle. Even the grammar refuses to give it much space, since "not like" dismisses the idea almost in passing.
The stanza break is where the poem turns, and it pivots on a "not… but…" structure. After the negative comes the positive: "but wild as the ivy / on a high burn." The comparison is surprising. We might expect a fox to be as wild as a wolf, or a storm, or something with teeth. Instead the poem chooses a plant. Ivy is often a tamed, wall-climbing thing in gardens and churchyards, so putting it on a "high burn" moves it into a place nobody manages. Its wildness lies in how it grows, stubbornly, in its own direction, covering and clinging and persisting. The comparison suggests that the fox's wildness is not about violence but about being fully itself, unowned.
"Burn" is the most interesting word in the poem because it can be read two ways. In Scots and northern English it means a stream, so a "high burn" would be a fast little watercourse up on a hillside, which fits the remote, rugged setting. It also means something scorched, and the poem gives no clue that rules this out. If we hear that second sense, ivy growing on burnt ground would be a picture of life pushing back after destruction. I can't say which Bonta intended, and the poem is stronger for leaving both open. Either way, the place is high, elemental, and far from shop windows.
The sound of the poem supports its meaning. A long "i" runs through "daylight", "like", "wild", "ivy" and "high", binding the fox to the image of the plant by echo as well as by simile. The rhythm is spare. Both short lines of each couplet land on stressed monosyllables, "fox" and "burn", while the longer phrases between them, "not like a neck fashion" and "wild as the ivy", move more lightly. The final two beats, "high burn", end the poem with a thud, like a door closing on the argument. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and the lowercase lines look like something noticed rather than composed, which matches the sense of a sudden sighting.
What makes "Pelt" worth reading is how much it does with the gap between title and text. The title names the dead object, and the poem spends its length restoring the life that object once held. It never lectures about fur or cruelty. It simply replaces a fashion word with a living one and lets a trailing plant on a hillside stand for the animal's freedom. Because the poem is so short, the reader has to complete it, and that is where the effect lies. Having imagined the stole and then seen it rejected, we are left holding both pictures at once.