Too Close to the Bonfire

The other evening, I was reading Robert Frost’s The Bonfire to my children (among other poems by Frost). It was bedtime, and my choleric youngest, who always resists settling down, was listening. Frost’s images of kindling a fire and drawing people around it are plain enough on the surface. But as I read aloud, I could almost hear Gil Bailie in my head, drawing out the deeper cultural resonances, showing how even a seemingly modest New England poem discloses truths about desire, ritual, and violence.

In “The Bonfire,” Frost describes a group of neighbors kindling a huge fire on a hillside, a blaze so fierce it seems almost volcanic. What begins as a communal act of warmth and camaraderie turns violent: the fire spreads, blackening the hill and startling those who later return to find the landscape transformed. The poem moves from pastoral imagery to something elemental and dangerous, as if the playing with fire has awakened an older, uncontrollable force.

Let’s all but bring to life this old volcano,
If that is what the mountain ever was—
And scare ourselves. Let wild fire loose we will….

Frost’s fire is no mere campfire. It is a volcano held in miniature. It gathers neighbors to tend it, to watch it, to feed it. And yet its power is not benign; it recalls something explosive, something we cannot master. In this way the bonfire reveals itself as more than warmth or conviviality. It is a cultural center, an echo of humanity’s ancient habit of gathering around fire and (with Rene Girard’s insights to guide us) around violence.

T.S. Eliot makes a similar gesture in Little Gidding. He describes “the weak pipe and the little drum,” the ordinary rituals of communal life, and then the circle of dancers around the bonfire. But he warns: all is well, so long as you do not come too close. The dance works only at a distance. At the center of Frost’s poem lies a perilous secret.

Haven’t you heard what we have lived to learn?
Nothing so new—something we had forgotten:
War is for everyone, for children too.
I wasn’t going to tell you and I mustn’t.
The best way is to come up hill with me
And have our fire and laugh and be afraid.

What both poets intuit — and what Bailie helped so many of us to see — is that culture itself is born of this fire. Ritual, music, dance, poetry: these are the weak pipes and little drums meant to domesticate the blaze, to give us a manageable distance from it. The bonfire dazzles us with its light and warmth, but beneath it still rumbles the volcano.

Neighbors coming home from town
Couldn’t believe that so much black had come there
While they had backs turned, that it hadn’t been there
When they had passed an hour or so before
Going the other way and they not seen it.
They looked about for someone to have done it.
But there was no one.

This is why cultures are always surprised by violence. We think it has erupted suddenly, as if out of nowhere. But the truth is that our rituals and institutions already revolve around it. Violence has always been the fire at the center, concealed by the very symbols and stories meant to manage it.

To read Frost with Bailie’s ear is to hear the crackle of culture itself. The bonfire is never just wood and flame. It is our ritual attempt to contain the volcano, to give it a focus and a form. But in Frost’s poem, the fire finally escapes its boundaries. The hillside burns black, and the neighbors look for someone to blame. The ritual center has dissolved into contagion. The fire has gone mimetic.

Culture builds bonfires to keep the fire in one place. But when the flame leaps the circle, when imitation and rivalry spread unchecked, we rediscover how thin our control has always been. Then, like Frost’s neighbors, we look for someone to have done it. But there was no one. In that absence, we glimpse the world after the Cross, a world where the old magic no longer works, where the victim cannot stay hidden, and where the fire’s true origin finally comes into view.