Lola Ridge wrote “The Fire” in the years scarred by the First World War, when the language of glory and sacrifice had begun to sound hollow. Born in Ireland, raised in New Zealand and Australia, and later a radical voice in New York’s modernist circles, Ridge was known for poetry that sided with the powerless. “The Fire,” included in her 1920 collection *Sun-Up and Other Poems*, reads as a compact fable of the war’s moral arithmetic: old men stay warm while young men are consumed.
The poem’s situation is brutally simple. The old men of the world have made a fire to warm their trembling hands. Rather than feed it with wood, they poke the young men in. If one tries to run, the old men catch him, bind him, and throw him back. The central idea is not subtle: the comfort and power of an older generation depend on the burning up of the young. Yet the poem does not point at a single nation or battle. It uses “the old men of the world,” a phrase that broadens the accusation into an ancient, recurring pattern of sacrifice.
Ridge builds the poem as free verse, without rhyme, so it moves with the plainness of a folk tale or nightmare. The sentences are short and declarative. “They poke the young men in. / The young men burn like withes.” That brevity makes the violence feel immediate and almost mechanical. The repeated line “Green withes burn slow...” acts as a dark refrain. Green branches are full of sap and life; they do not catch fire easily. They hiss, smoulder, and suffer. That image turns the young men into fresh, living fuel whose torment is drawn out. The ellipses after “slow” and “hands” create pauses that feel like smoke hanging in the air, or a speaker too sickened to finish the thought.
The poem’s key words are few and repeated so they become ritualistic. “Old men” and “young men” face each other across the fire. Fire promises warmth but delivers agony. Smoke links the two groups: it rises from the young men’s torment and spreads over the sky, while the old men sit below and rub their hands. Ridge’s image of the smoke “round and sheer as the trunk of a pillared oak” is especially striking. Smoke should be formless, but this smoke is solid and architectural, like a giant tree-trunk or temple column built from burning bodies. The darkness thereof spreads, turning the sky itself into a monument to harm. The phrase “for ever and ever” echoes the language of prayer, but here it belongs to no blessing; it makes the rising smoke endless, an eternal accusation.
What makes “The Fire” significant is its refusal to decorate war with honour. The old men are not villains in a melodrama; they are simply cold and entitled, rubbing their hands by the flames they have arranged. The young men are not heroes charging into battle but withes tied and thrown. In a few lines, Ridge collapses the distance between war and human sacrifice, between political rhetoric and the smell of green wood burning. The poem remains disturbing because it asks how often such fires are still built, and how easily the old men’s comfort depends on the slow burning of the young.