To exhaust one’s energies or resources; to stay up late playing and rise early to work hard all day. This expression came into English in the seventeenth century from French (brusler la chandelle par les deux bouts) via Randle Cotgrave’s Dictionary (1611), which defined it as dissipating one’s material wealth. It soon acquired a more general meaning (“He consuming just like a candle on both ends, betwixt wine and women,” Richard Flecknoe, 1658) and appeared regularly enough so that Eric Partridge believed it was a cliché by the mid-eighteenth century. Though clichés usually are not the province of fine poetry, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “First Fig” (1920) used this one: “My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—It gives a lovely light.”