Nobody in Dave Bonta's "High class" is doing anything sensible, and that is exactly why the speaker finds hope in them. A man with a sword picks a fight with the clouds. A gardener talks, and a group of fine ladies listen so happily that they are carried "all the way to the moon." In six unpunctuated lines, the poem suggests that hope lives in gestures that are graceful, impractical and aimed upward, and that it has little to do with rank or usefulness.
The title does a lot of the work. "High class" first suggests the world of "society fellows" and "fine ladies", people defined by social position. But the poem's imagery keeps pulling the phrase toward its other meaning: clouds, moon, the literal high. By the end, "high class" seems to describe anyone whose imagination climbs, not anyone born to a certain station. The gardener, the most earthbound figure in the poem, a person of soil and spades, turns out to be the one who lifts everyone else off the ground.
The grammar is deliberately loose. There are no capitals and no punctuation, so the opening "who gives me hope" can be read as a question or as the start of a statement. Either way it has no antecedent, which makes it feel like the middle of a conversation. The second stanza's "or" then reads like another answer to that question: *or* the fine ladies, *or* the gardener. The lack of punctuation also leaves "all the way to the moon" free to attach to several things. Does the gardener talk that far, do the ladies listen that far, or does his talk carry them there? The poem doesn't choose, and the blur is part of its charm, since the sentence itself drifts upward the way its subjects do.
The shape on the page supports this. The first stanza is short, long, short: "who gives me hope" and "who takes on the clouds" frame the swollen middle line, "some society fellow with a sword." The sword, appropriately, takes up space. The second stanza tapers from two long lines down to the brisk "all the way to the moon," so it ends on a kind of lift-off. There is no rhyme, but the sounds are carefully handled. The soft l's of "fine ladies listening with pleasure" feel like the sound of people settling comfortably into their seats, while the sibilance of "some society fellow with a sword" has a slight hiss of swagger. Both stanzas end on open, rounded words, "clouds" and "moon", so the poem's last sounds in each half are airy ones.
The images are comic but not contemptuous. A sword is meant for solid enemies, and clouds cannot be cut, so the fellow's battle is hopeless from the start. The phrase "takes on" carries a double sense, too: to challenge, but also to assume a quality, as if the swordsman might become a little cloudlike himself. The word "some" ("some society fellow") sounds like a shrug, a mild teasing of the upper crust. Yet he is the one who "gives me hope." The gardener's scene is gentler. We never learn what he says, only that the ladies listen "with pleasure," and the poem trusts that we can imagine something wonderful enough to carry them to the moon. The swordsman may remind some readers of Don Quixote charging at windmills, though Bonta's opponent is even less solid.
What makes the poem worth a second look is how much it holds in so little. It treats absurdity and tenderness as close relatives, and it quietly turns a class hierarchy on its head: the "high" people are only admirable when they aim at something higher than themselves, and the humble gardener earns his place among them through the power of his talk. Nothing in the poem is explained or argued, but the hope it describes feels earned, because it comes from small, odd, generous acts of imagination.