Most poems about contentment sound pleased with themselves. Dave Bonta's "Anchorite" is stranger and quieter: in six short lines it calls the loss of hope a blessing. The title supplies the context. An anchorite is someone who has withdrawn from ordinary life, traditionally for religious reasons, and the word comes from a Greek verb meaning "to withdraw." We never see a cell, a church or a desert. We get only a mind that has stopped reaching, and a stretch of water.
The first sentence has no verb: "A great blessing / to put an end to hopes / of getting more." It reads like the conclusion of a long argument the speaker has already had with himself. The surprise is the word "blessing." We usually treat hope as a virtue and giving it up as defeat. Bonta reverses that by being specific about which hope he means. It is not hope in general but "hopes / of getting more," plural and acquisitive, the kind that keeps a person leaning toward the next thing. The line break helps. "Hopes" ends its line and stands alone for a moment, as if it might be praised, before "of getting more" reveals it as appetite. The full stop after "more" is an act of ending in its own right, and the poem shuts that door before turning to the sea.
The second sentence is the plainest in the poem: "The sea is clear." After the abstraction of the opening, it is a flat statement of fact. The sea is the opposite of "more." It is the largest thing imaginable, yet nobody tries to acquire it, and Bonta gives it a single adjective and nothing else. That restraint matches the speaker's own pared-down state.
The word "clear" carries the poem's meaning. It first describes water, meaning transparent. When it returns in "and I am clear," it shifts. The speaker is clear in the way a table, a debt or a road can be cleared: free of clutter and obligation, no longer cloudy with wanting. Then "to the sea" slides in on its own short line, and the preposition leaves two readings open. The speaker may be transparent to the sea, seen through as easily as he sees through it. Or he may have an unobstructed way all the way to it. The poem doesn't choose, and the dash before "and I am clear" works as a hinge, joining sea and self so that the second clause feels like a consequence of the first.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter, but the line lengths are carefully shaped. The syllables run four, six, four, then four, four, three. The longest line is the one that holds the ending, "to put an end to hopes," and its stopped consonants (p, t, d, t) make it sound like something being shut. After that the sounds soften and the lines shrink. "The sea is clear" is all sibilance and open vowels, and the final line, at three syllables, is the shortest, so the poem seems to dissolve into the very thing it names. The "I" is also placed with care. It appears only in the fifth line, after four lines of impersonal statement, and sits between two mentions of the sea. The self arrives late and is surrounded.
What makes "Anchorite" worth reading is how much it does without declaring it. Its compression resembles haiku, though it keeps no syllable count. It also doesn't say whether the speaker is happy. "Clear" is not the same as "joyful," and a reader can take the poem as peace or as a bleak emptying out. The wording allows both. A blessing that consists of ending hope is a startling claim, and Bonta makes it in plain words. The poem asks whether we want a life of reaching, or one where we can be seen through, like clear water.