This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
On July 25, 1901, fire broke out in the Weyerhaeuser and Denkmann Lumber Yard in Davenport. It eventually devastated fifteen acres, destroyed fifty homes, and cause a million dollars of damage. The glow could be seen for fifty miles.
Disasters of that magnitude bring out the best in people—especially in poets, who have a hard time finding epic subjects in our modern world.
The Davenport fire poet got right to work. He had to build up to the fire itself. What better way than to begin across the river in Moline and follow the driver of a fire wagon across Sylvan Slough, across Arsenal Island, across the Mississippi bridge, and on to the fire.
Listen to the first four stanzas.
"Help, or we perish! Our city's on fire!"
Such is the cry that thrills over the wire.
There is no hesitation, no shrinking with fear;
Each fireman springs to his place with a cheer.
At the clang of the gong the team leap from their stall!
In a second they're ready—men, horses, and all.
The wide door swings open with rattle and crash,
And the men to the rescue are off in a flash."
And on it goes. If you have detected some echoes of "T’was the night before Christmas," here, it's understandable. A poet writing about a fire doesn't have time to make up his own rhymes and rhythms.
Now the fire wagon is on the island. "And galloping, galloping, galloping fast/ They've swept the full length of the island at last." Now the driver reaches the Mississippi. "Across the wide river the flames flash in view/And the horses tho' panting leap forward anew."
It takes the poet twenty-one stanzas to reach the scene of the fire. And then, the poem ends. Where are the burning timbers, the charred desolation, the innocent victims? It may be that the fire was out by the time his closed couplets got there. It may be that his imagination turned out to be less epic than he had suspected. Or it could just be that he had already used up all the words he knew that rhymed with “fire.”
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
