Six short lines, and a whole small drama. The speaker announces that he has found home, and it turns out to be a painting in a gold frame, "as natural / as a great garden." Meanwhile the person he loves is howling about a tick. The poem never says where anyone is standing, but the natural reading is that the beloved is out in some real garden or field, dealing with real nature, while the speaker looks at the picture of one. The central idea is a quiet, slightly uncomfortable contrast between nature as we like to imagine it, calm and ornamental, and nature as it actually behaves, which includes things that crawl onto you and bite.
The title sets this up. An idyll is traditionally a picture of peaceful country life, so "Idyll" promises serenity. Dave Bonta gives us one, but he locks it inside a frame and then lets the last stanza undercut it. The poem is partly about the idyll as a genre: a beautiful way of looking at the countryside that leaves out the ticks.
The simile at the centre is odd when you look at it closely. A painting is by definition not natural, yet the speaker calls it "as natural as a great garden." And a garden isn't wild nature either, because it is nature arranged by people. So the comparison sets one kind of artifice beside another, and the speaker seems content with that. The word "find" matters too. He doesn't build or make a home, he comes across it, ready-made and already hung on a wall. The "gold frame" suggests richness, but it is also a boundary. Everything inside it is controlled and finished, and nothing in it can bite. The tick has no frame.
The sound of the poem does some of the arguing. It is free verse with no rhyme and no punctuation, arranged in three two-line stanzas. The first two stanzas move smoothly, and the repeated g sounds in "gold," "great" and "garden" give the painted world a warm, rounded feel. Then the third stanza stumbles. "While you who I love howl" is six one-syllable words in a row, and the stresses pile up so that you can't glide through it. The line breaks just as "howl" lands, which leaves the sound hanging in the air for a beat. Only then does "about a tick" arrive, small and soft, and the effect is deflating. After a howl, the cause seems almost comic. But a tick is also a genuinely unpleasant thing to find on your skin, and the poem lets both readings stand. We can't tell whether the beloved is overreacting or the speaker is being unfeeling.
"Howl" is the most striking word in the poem. It is an animal sound, so the beloved, in distress, briefly becomes part of the wild world, while the speaker sits in the one place where nothing wild can reach him. "You who I love" is also worth a look. The grammar is conversational ("who" rather than the stricter "whom"), and the declaration of love is tucked into the middle of the line like a parenthesis, almost a defence. The speaker insists he loves this person, yet the poem has just told us he finds home in a picture rather than in them. The little word "while" holds the tension. It can mean "at the same time," and it can also mean "whereas," and the poem lets it do both jobs.
The tone is hard to pin down. It could be gentle self-mockery, with the speaker aware of how absurd it is to be contentedly admiring a painted garden while a real person flails nearby. It could also be a more serious admission about the way we sometimes retreat into a tidy version of the world, art or memory or ideas, when the real one gets messy. Judging by the text alone, the poem doesn't choose.
The poem's significance lies in how much it fits into so little space. It raises questions about what "home" means, and whether it is a place, a person, or an image we prefer. It also asks what we mean by "natural," and whether we love nature or only a framed version of it. The lack of a final full stop suits it, since the poem doesn't tie anything up. The howling goes on, the painting stays on the wall, and we are left to decide which of the two is home.