A question with no question mark opens Dave Bonta's "Tumult": "do the wicked pray for tumult". The idea is already strange. Prayer is usually a request for calm, so praying for noise and disorder sounds like a contradiction. The second line complicates things further: "the holy drum and trumpet". The grammar won't settle. "Drum" and "trumpet" can be instruments owned by the holy, or verbs describing what the holy do, since both words can mean making a loud, announcing noise. On the second reading the question answers itself. The wicked may pray for tumult, but the holy are hardly quiet.
That ambiguity is the heart of the poem. Its three couplets offer three kinds of uproar: sacred or ceremonial music, an army on the move, and the "bawdy work of a tongue". Ordinarily we sort these into the pious, the violent and the vulgar. The poem lets them run together, and it never says which is the wicked tumult and which the holy one. The missing question mark helps. The reader has to supply the tone, and with it the judgment.
The central image, "fields full of soldiers / riding up and down", is the most visual moment. "Fields" suggests farmland, a place of growing and quiet, and the soldiers fill it like a crop. "Riding" suggests horsemen, and there is no battle or enemy in sight, only restless movement. "Up and down" goes nowhere. It has the rocking regularity of a drumbeat, so the phrase works as sound as well as picture. Tumult here is not a single violent act but a constant churning that has no purpose beyond itself.
The poem has no rhyme, but it is built from sound. A dull, thudding vowel recurs in "tumult", "drum", "trumpet", "up" and "tongue", as if the poem were being drummed on one low note. Hard consonants add to it: the b of "bawdy" and "barbarous", the d of "drum" and "down", the t of "trumpet", "tongue" and "tune". Read aloud, the poem is percussive. The lines are short, six to eight syllables, with no fixed metre, and the stress falls heavily on the nouns. The lack of capitals and punctuation adds to the effect. Nothing begins or ends firmly, so the poem seems to spill out without a full stop.
The last couplet turns on the small word "or". The tumult might not be a trumpet or a cavalry charge at all, but "the bawdy work of a tongue". "Work" is a good choice, since it makes crude talk or song sound like labour, something done daily and routinely. "Tongue" can mean the organ, but it also means a language, and "barbarous" strengthens that second sense. The word comes from a Greek term for foreigners whose speech sounded to Greek ears like meaningless babble. The tongue is therefore both crude and incomprehensible, and the noise belongs to someone else, the outsider.
Then the poem ends on "tune". After all the drumming and riding, the final word is a gentler one, and it suggests the noise has a shape and is perhaps even attractive. The phrase "that barbarous tune" has the pointing quality of "that" in speech, as if the speaker could hear it nearby. A barbarous tune is one we can recognise and hum. The poem hints that we may be drawn to tumult, even when we call it wicked.
The poem's significance lies in how much it fits into six lines and how little it resolves. It starts as a moral question and turns into a study of how alike sacred noise, military noise and vulgar noise are. By refusing to separate them, it makes readers wonder where they would draw the line themselves. It reads as a puzzle about hearing, and it gives no verdict.