Seven short lines, one candle and a single word from the New Testament in the title: Dave Bonta packs a surprising amount of light into «Pentecostal». On the surface, the scene is simple. At night, under the moon, a speaker reads by a stub of candle. The books belong to a "pretty woman" who "speaks Latin," and as he reads, the images in them seem to catch fire. Underneath, the poem suggests that reading can feel like inspiration, and that language, when it truly takes hold of us, behaves like flame.
The title explains the poem. In the Pentecost story, flames like tongues rest on a group of believers and they begin speaking in other languages. Bonta keeps both meanings of "tongue" alive. In the last line the images "burn / in the sovereign, singing tongue," and the word means a spoken language and a licking flame at once. The candle, the burning images and the singing language are folded into one event. The speaker is not in a church, and nothing is said about religion. The poem takes the old miracle and moves it into a private room, where the miracle is a person reading.
The opening sets up a contrast of scale. "By the light of the moon" is wide and cool, while "my little candle" is small, warm and possessive. Calling the candle "a stranger" is odd, because it is the speaker's own light. But beside the moon's natural glow, a handmade flame does seem like an outsider, and the word may also hint at how foreign the speaker feels in this world of Latin and someone else's books. The candle shrinks as the poem goes on. By line five it has become "an inch of candle," a measurement that quietly counts down. The reading is precious partly because the light will run out.
The vocabulary shifts register in a way that shapes the poem's mood. Words like "little," "pretty" and "inch" are plain, almost childlike. Then "sovereign" arrives, a word of kings and authority. Latin has a long history as a language of church, law and scholarship, so "sovereign" may nod to that (the poem doesn't say). Yet Latin is also a language no one grows up speaking, and Bonta makes it "singing," which suggests chant and music rather than dusty grammar. The "pretty woman" is left unexplained. She could be a real person, or a figure for Latin or for books themselves. The poem doesn't say, and the ambiguity lets love for a woman, love for her books and love for a language blur together.
The form is unrhymed free verse. The lines are short, with only two to four strong beats each, and they lengthen toward the end. The sentences are loose. "I love her books / by an inch of candle, / see the images burn" runs on with a comma where a full stop might be expected, and the subject quietly drops out before "see." The speaker seems to slide from stating a feeling to simply watching, or perhaps to inviting us to watch with him. The line break after "books" also lets that word stand alone for a moment before the candle's inch of light is added.
Sound does the work that rhyme might have done. The last line is the longest and slowest, and it is full of soft s sounds: "sovereign, singing." The hissing quality hushes the line, as if the speaker were reading half aloud so as not to wake anyone. It ends on "tongue," a heavy single beat on the poem's key word.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. In seven lines it manages to be intimate and grand, domestic and sacred, without ever raising its voice. It also contains a small paradox: a language that is no one's mother tongue sings, while a nearly spent candle becomes the bearer of a miracle. For a student reader, it is a good example of how one carefully chosen title and one double-edged word can turn an ordinary night of reading into something that feels like revelation.