Viking funerals usually arrive in the imagination with blazing longships and warriors sent off in glory. Dave Bonta's "Viking Burial" offers something quieter: a small boat under a dune, opened and closed again, slowly going back to earth. A burial site is plundered, partly emptied and reburied, and the wood begins to rot away. What it leaves behind is the poem's central idea. People and their beliefs vanish, and the only thing that endures is a pattern: "orderly rows" of iron nails "preserving the shape / that faith once took."
The first stanza sets the scene with a striking metaphor. The skiff "rides inside a wave / of sand," so the dune becomes a frozen sea and the boat is still sailing, only very slowly. The robbers "take everything but / the bronze hammer of Thor, / an odd coin or two / & several crosses." Then comes the poem's most puzzling line: "hammers / on their way to being men." Judging by the imagery, the crosses are being compared to Thor's hammer because of their T-like shape, and the line seems to catch a religious changeover in progress. The old god's emblem and the new faith's symbol lie in the same sand, and the cross, with its human figure, is a hammer that is turning into a man. The word "odd" in "odd coin" also works twice, meaning both "occasional" and "strange."
The second stanza reads like a field report: "seven graves," "three males & four females," "before the age of 30." The numbers are flat and unemotional, so the cause of death hits harder. These people died of "disease or famine," not in battle. Seven bodies crammed into "this one small craft" suggest a hard, poor life (an inference, but a natural one). Then the poem allows itself one tender simile: the bones are "jumbled together / like beads from a broken cord." Beads are small, personal, once worn and once strung in order. Their scattering shows what the burial has lost, which is the thread that held these lives together. The poem also leaves a quiet irony in the verbs. The same "grave-robbers" who plunder the site also "re-bury the skeletons," as if theft and respect could share a pair of hands.
The last stanza turns to the landscape. "The pastures are poor, / trees have grown scarce, / the land is hungry for wood." Hunger returns here, now belonging to the soil, and it echoes the famine that killed the people. Once the "sod roof" is back, the boat can "melt into the soil," a soft verb for something as hard as a ship. The wood feeds the ground, which gives the burial a small, practical mercy. But iron does not melt. The nails stay in their "orderly rows," in deliberate contrast to the "jumbled" bones, and the final lines define faith as a shape rather than a feeling or a doctrine. Nails also carry a faint echo of the cross from stanza one, though that is the reader's inference, not something the poem states. The last word, "took," in the past tense beside "once," finishes the thought. The faith is over, and only its outline is left.
The form matches this restraint. There are three eight-line stanzas, with no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are short and conversational, and the line breaks put weight on small hinge-words. "Take everything but" hangs at a line's end before the hammer appears, and "from seven graves in" leaves the reader momentarily unsupported before "this one small craft." The ampersand, used only once, gives the voice a casual, notebook-like feel. Sound does quiet work too: *skiff, sand, sod, skeletons, small, soil* thread through the poem and keep the reader's ear in the dune. Unrhymed lines suit a subject where nothing resolves neatly, yet the equal stanzas, like three tidy plots, give the poem the order its bones lack.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal of grandeur. It gives us short, hungry lives, a borrowed faith and a boat too small for glory, and it still finds dignity in the way matter keeps a form after meaning has gone. In the poem's last image, the thing that survives is not a belief but the pattern that belief left in the ground.