A fire is a strange thing to be the subject of an elegy, yet "The Burning" manages to be both a chronicle of destruction and a lament. Dorothy Marie Davis watches a ghost town go up in flames and refuses to treat the blaze as a simple accident. The poem sets two explanations side by side: the official one, in which no one knows what spark started it, and the one whispered by old men, in which the town is consumed by its own buried past. Bodie, the poem suggests, did not so much catch fire as finally pay a debt.
The opening quatrain makes the flame a living creature before it becomes a catastrophe. It is "a little hungry tongue" that "darts out" and "curls," language that belongs more to a snake or a small animal than to combustion. That modest, almost curious beginning makes the escalation more frightening. By the second quatrain the creature has grown into a "glutton blaze" that "devours saloon and hall," and its sounds are human: it "roars and crackles high demented laughter." The fire has acquired an appetite, then a personality, then a kind of madness. The word "demented" is the key turn, because laughter at the destruction of a town implies malice, and malice implies motive.
The poet also gives the dying buildings a strange vitality. The "old foot-guttered timbers writhe about / As if some life pervaded Bodie still." Here the poem cleverly reverses expectations: a ghost town is supposed to be dead, yet it is only in burning that it seems alive. The writhing wood looks like a body in pain, and the line quietly hints that the town's last act of life is its death. Even the details of decay, the "rotted sagging sill" and the "mouldy wall," set up a contrast with the fire's energy. The fire even "licks the cobwebs" away, a nearly tender gesture that makes the destruction feel intimate rather than impersonal.
The form is a sonnet, though a slightly unusual one. The first eight lines rhyme alternately (out/about, sill/still, hall/wall, rafter/laughter), and the iambic pentameter gives the fire a steady, marching momentum. Several lines use a long, trailing syntax, with "And... And..." stacked together in the final lines of the octave, so that the sentence seems to spread the way flames do. The closing six lines break from this pattern, and the poem ends on a rhyming couplet, "deep" and "asleep." That final pair lands like a verdict. The couplet is also where the poem's central idea becomes explicit: "Some smouldering revenge but six feet deep / Leaped free to burn old Bodie town, asleep."
That phrase "six feet deep" is the most loaded in the poem. Six feet is the depth of a grave, so the image works on two levels at once. It points to the mine "depths heated as from coals of hell," but it also suggests buried bodies and buried grievances, something the town covered over rather than resolved. The poem never says what the "greeds and hates" were, and that restraint is its strength; the reader is left to imagine the violence a boomtown might have concealed. The poem is careful to attribute this explanation to hearsay, "old men tell," so the idea of fiery justice remains a legend rather than a fact. Meanwhile "They say they do not know" gives the official account an air of evasion, as though not knowing were a convenient choice.
The final word, "asleep," is chilling because it makes Bodie an innocent victim at the very moment the poem accuses it of guilt. That tension is what makes the poem linger. It treats a ruin's destruction as both tragedy and consequence, and it suggests that places, like people, cannot bury what they have done forever. In fourteen lines, it turns a burning building into a small parable about memory.