Who could possibly be against fire? Dave Bonta puts the question in the opening line of "In praise of fire" and answers it almost before we've finished reading it: "besides books." It's a joke, but a loaded one. Books are the thing everyone knows fire destroys, so the line sets up a quiet contest between two kinds of experience: the written, shelved and preserved, and the burning, immediate and soon gone. A poem, which is itself made of words, has just volunteered to take fire's side.
The rest of the poem is the praise, but it never argues. It offers pictures instead. "It is sand on the back / a kiss in the dark." The pronoun "it" arrives without explanation, and fire is defined only through the body: grit stuck to skin, a sudden closeness. Judging by the imagery, we might imagine a beach at night and people lying near a fire, though the poem doesn't say so. Sand also has a double life here, since it is what smothers flames and, in the right heat, what can be melted into glass. Whether or not Bonta intended that, it hovers behind the line. The "dark" matters too, because a flame is most itself when there is nothing else to see by.
The third couplet shrinks fire down to almost nothing: "nothing but the opinion / of a match." This is the wittiest moment. The poem began by asking who is *against* fire, and being for or against is what having an opinion means. A match, then, is a tiny, stubborn point of view that spreads if nobody argues back. The line break helps the joke. "Nothing but the opinion" sounds dismissive, even modest, and only then does "of a match" arrive to explain it. "Nothing but" also carries a faint menace, because the smallest opinions are often the ones that set everything alight.
The final image changes direction: "or a masquerade / where antique dresses dance." The word "or" matters. The poem doesn't settle on one definition. It offers alternatives, as if fire were too restless to be pinned to a single comparison. Flames are dresses here, rustling and swirling, always changing shape like guests in disguise. "Antique" suggests that fire is old, as old as gatherings around a hearth. I would also read a small warning in it, since old, delicate dresses are exactly what catches fire. That is an inference from the image, not something the poem states, but it fits the way the whole poem balances pleasure against danger.
The form supports this. There are four couplets, no capital letters after the title, no punctuation and no rhyme. Without a question mark, the opening line reads half as a question and half as a dare. The missing punctuation also lets the lines run on like a flame, with no full stops to put it out. The lines are short, between three and seven syllables, and the sound is full of hard *k* and *ch* consonants: "back," "kiss," "dark," "match," "masquerade." Said aloud, they crackle. The first and third couplets end on clipped, punchline-sized lines ("besides books," "of a match"), while the last one lengthens and closes on "dance," so the poem finishes in motion rather than with a full stop.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so few words. Its images move from touch (sand, a kiss) to the tiny (a match) to the theatrical (a masquerade), so fire ranges from the intimate to the spectacular without ever being explained. It also behaves the way fire does, flaring up briefly and leaving the reader slightly warmer. And it shows that praise doesn't have to be solemn. Bonta's tribute is playful, a little mischievous, and aware that the thing it loves is dangerous. The poem sides with fire against books, and in doing so reminds us that some experiences can only be suggested, never fully written down.