A campfire, Sarah A. Heinzerling suggests, is only as good as its smoke is thin. "Campfire Song" is a light, teasing poem about how quickly a happy gathering can curdle, and how little it takes to do it. The whole mood of a party, she implies, rests on something as small and physical as which way the wind is blowing.
The poem is built as a contrast between two states, one per stanza, with a third that tips the balance into comedy. In the first, the fire "burning brightly" produces everything a camping trip promises: friends gather "nightly," songs are "lusty," tales are "gusty." Those two adjectives do a lot of work. They sound alike, and they pair noise with energy, so you can almost hear a crowd roaring through a chorus and a storyteller puffing out his chest. The stanza ends on "camping praise," a phrase that makes the whole scene sound like a small act of worship, with the fire as the thing being honoured.
The second stanza flips every one of those pleasures. Where the fire was "brightly" burning, it is now merely "smoky," and the rhymes shrink with it: "smoky" chimes with "poky," a word that suggests sulking and dragging feet rather than anything truly dramatic. The crowd is "cross" instead of cheerful, the songs are "flat" (a nice double meaning, since it describes both a bad singing voice and a deflated mood), and friends "begin to spat." That last verb is well chosen. A spat is a petty quarrel, which is exactly the scale of trouble smoke can cause. Nobody is wounded; everybody just "feels themselves abused," a stiffly formal phrase that sounds funnier for being applied to something as trivial as stinging eyes.
Structurally, the poem is neat and tightly controlled. Each stanza is six lines, built from short, bouncing lines and a rhyme scheme that pairs the opening lines and then closes with a rhyming couplet frame (in the first stanza, "brightly/nightly," then "blaze," then "lusty/gusty," then "praise"). The rhythm is quick and sing-song, close to the bounce of a nursery rhyme or a camp chant, which suits the subject. That jauntiness also sets up the humour: the verse itself behaves like a happy song, even while describing the moment the song goes wrong. Many of the rhymes are double rhymes ("brightly/nightly," "lusty/gusty," "smoky/poky"), which tend to sound playful and slightly silly, a pleasure in rhyming for its own sake.
The final stanza is where the poem earns its wit. The irritated campers, "with eye-lids red and smarty" (smarting, in other words), "name the campfire party / As man has done before," and then leave "quoting loudly, / With one accord and proudly, / The Raven's 'never-more.'" The reference is to Poe's famous poem, in which a raven repeats one grim word, "Nevermore." Here the great gloom of that poem is shrunk down to a verdict on a smoky evening: never again will we do this. The joke depends on mismatch. Poe's refrain belongs to grief and despair; Heinzerling lends it to people with watering eyes. Notice also the word "proudly," which hints that there is a certain satisfaction in complaining together. Even in disappointment, the group is united "with one accord," so the smoke, ironically, brings them back into harmony, though a harmony of grumbling rather than song.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets out of a small, familiar experience. It does not moralise or strain for depth. It simply notices that comfort and good humour are fragile, and that the grand vocabulary of despair is often borrowed to describe very minor discomforts. The effect is affectionate rather than sneering: the poet seems to belong to the group she is gently mocking, someone who has certainly sat in the smoke herself.