Most poems about the self look inward with solemnity. Dave Bonta's "Woke" begins instead with something close to a polite handshake: "my old acquaintance myself." The speaker treats the self as someone met again after a long gap, which is both funny and a little sad, since it admits how little we sometimes know the person we live with. The phrase may also faintly recall "auld acquaintance" from the New Year song, a song about remembering and renewing, though that is an inference rather than anything the poem states.
The central idea is a change in self-judgment. The speaker can now "see the difference between now / and heretofore," a time when "I reckoned you / a purgatory." The word choices matter here. "Reckoned" is an accountant's verb, suggesting a cold tally of faults, and "heretofore" is stiff, legal and archaic, as if the past were being read out from a document. That formality keeps the earlier self at arm's length. "Purgatory" is the most interesting choice. It is not hell, which is permanent, but a place of waiting and cleansing from which there is a way out. Even the harsh old verdict, then, contained the possibility of release.
The construction is spare. There are two unrhymed quatrains, no punctuation, and no capitals except the pronoun "I." Without full stops, each stanza runs as one breath, and the reader has to decide where to pause. The line breaks do real work. "Between now" ends a line, and "and heretofore" begins the next, so the gap between present and past opens on the page. The first stanza then ends on the short, heavy "a purgatory," which drops like a stone after the longer lines before it.
The second stanza swaps argument for an image, and the pronouns shift with it. In the first stanza the speaker addresses "you," the former self. In the second the self is pointed at from outside: "this owlet is an owl." The demonstrative "this" is like a finger gesturing at a mirror. The sentence looks like a tautology, but the diminutive "-et" is the whole point. The young bird has grown into the thing it was always going to be, and the statement is flat and matter-of-fact, with no fanfare. Owls are a traditional emblem of wisdom, and the poem draws on that without overworking it.
The next line, "informed in the state of things," is slightly odd in its grammar. We might expect "informed of" the state of things, but "in" makes it sound more like being versed or at home in something. One can also hear "informed" as "given form," which suits a self that has taken shape. "State" is a double word too, meaning both the condition of the world and the condition of the speaker.
The ending is the most quietly clever part. The owl is not wise, only someone who "might seem wise / even by daylight." That hedge ("might seem") keeps the poem humble. Owls are night creatures, so wisdom that holds up "by daylight" is wisdom that survives ordinary, unflattering hours. It is a modest claim, perhaps a self-mocking one. Sound supports the modesty: the long "i" runs through "my," "I," "might," "wise" and "daylight," so the poem seems to close on a vowel it has been quietly repeating since its first line.
Then there is the title. "Woke" is the past tense of "wake," and it records the moment just after an awakening, which fits the poem's sense of having already crossed a threshold. In current usage the word also carries a political meaning, being alert to injustice. Whether or not Bonta intended it, that meaning hovers over a line like "informed in the state of things." Here, though, the awareness is turned inward, toward self-knowledge rather than social critique. The title is worth noticing for how it makes a reader's expectations work against the poem's own gentler purpose.
The poem's significance lies in what it manages without drama. It makes no great confession and no triumph. It gives us an inner shift in eight lines: a change of pronoun, a change of verdict, and one cautious verb. For students it shows how much weight a single word like "purgatory," "owlet" or "seem" can carry when everything around it is plain. It also suggests that growing up, or growing wiser, may mostly be a matter of finally making peace with the person you've been living with all along.