The visitors' room of a monastery is a threshold: half inside the cloister, half in the world. Myra Scovel's poem takes place in exactly that in-between space, and its drama is quiet enough to miss. A monk receives a visitor, a woman, apparently someone who once loved him and whom he once loved. Nothing dramatic happens. They sit, a fire burns, a few words are spoken. Yet beneath the stillness the poem stages a struggle between two kinds of fire: the human passion that "would burn me to ash" and the divine presence that burns without destroying.
The speaker is the monk himself, and the poem is built from his point of view, which means we get his self-surveillance rather than her feelings. The opening is almost comically polite: "Now that our greetings are over / A silence has fallen upon us." But the silence is full. Within a few lines he notices she is wearing "the color you know I love," a detail that reveals both how well they know each other and how closely he is still watching. The visitor dresses with intention, and he registers it. Even the "plumes of your small hat" that "quiver" later in the poem carry the same charge: small physical details, noticed with a tenderness he is trying not to feel.
The central image is the fire in the hearth, and Scovel lets it do double duty. At first it is simple domestic comfort, with fresh wood laid and cassock folds smoothed, ordinary gestures that give the nervous hands something to do. Then the description turns sensual: flames are "fingers" that "caress the rough jowls of a log." Caress is not a word a monk should be applying to firewood, and the verb gives him away. He is displacing desire onto the hearth, watching it happen safely at one remove. The poem then pulls back sharply with "Ah, but once this log / Was alive in the forest outside, / A tree that storms could not tame." The tree is a reminder of what fire does: it takes something wild and living and reduces it. The monk reads his own situation into it. His resolve is fragile, and he is "careful / That only the casual word falls between us, / That no spark is kindled." The language of fire has spread from the hearth into his anxiety about conversation itself.
Structurally, the poem is free verse, with no rhyme scheme and lines of varying length, and this suits its subject. The rhythm stays close to speech, the unhurried, hushed pace of two people not quite saying what they mean. The stanzas are uneven too, as though the poem is catching its breath. Her single line of dialogue, "Is it too late?" you ask, "Have you so quickly forgotten?", interrupts the speaker's careful control. Her questions are simple and direct, while his replies exist only as thought.
That is the poem's quiet tragedy: "How can I tell you...?" He never does. The final stanza is addressed to her, but it is spoken only inside his head, and the last line explains why. She "would not know of the bush ablaze / With a fire that never consumes." The allusion is to the burning bush of the Book of Exodus, where God speaks to Moses from a bush that burns without being destroyed. For the monk, that is the fire he has chosen, a love that does not reduce its object to ash.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to cheapen either side. It does not mock the woman or present her love as shallow, and it does not pretend the monk's vocation is easy. The pull is real, which is why the fire imagery runs so warm. The poem's strength lies in holding that tension without resolving it, and the final image, set against everything the hearth has shown us, suggests that choosing the unconsuming flame is a decision made again and again, not once.