Fire and Ice

I haven't always enjoyed poetry, but I have always admired the American poet Robert Frost.  I always felt that I could read and enjoy his poems without necessarily looking for a deeper, hidden meaning, even though the deeper meaning was always there.  One of Frost's most famous poems is one called "Fire and Ice".  It's a short poem (only 9 lines in length) that was first published in Harper's Magazine in December 1920.  Here it is:  

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

It's important to remember that the poem was written in the aftermath of World War I, one of the most tumultuous periods of time in history.  Chaos and revolution were the topics of the day and were frequent themes in a number of literary publications.  For example, the poet W.B. Yeats had written his poem "The Second Coming" just two years earlier with it famous line, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold."  Just five years after Frost wrote "Fire and Ice", the poet T.S. Eliot (see my post here) wrote his own apocalyptic poem "The Hollow Men" which declared, "This is the way the world ends.  Not with a bang but a whimper."

Frost's poem also discusses the end of the world, using two of the four classical or Aristotelian elements (earth, air, fire, water) as symbols for the two emotions of desire (fire) and hate (ice).  Just think about how often we use "fire" to denote the emotion of desire ("burning with desire").  Similarly, when we say someone is "ice cold", we generally are referring to the emotion of hate (at least on some level).  Frost then is telling us that the world will either end because we all hate and kill each other or our passionate and insatiable desire (for power, money, etc) will eventually lead to our destruction.  

Frost was reportedly inspired by a passage in Canto 32 of Dante's Inferno, in which the worst offenders of hell (the traitors) are frozen in the ninth and lowest circle: "a lake so bound with ice, / It did not look like water, but like a glass...right clear / I saw, where sinners are preserved in ice."   The astronomer Harlow Shapley claimed that Frost had once asked him how the world would end, to which Shapley replied that either the Sun would explode and burn up the Earth or the Sun would burn up and the Earth would freeze, along with all of civilization as we know it.

If the phrase "Fire and Ice" sounds familiar, it's because it is frequently used in a similar context.  For example, the writer George R.R. Martin used the phrase in the title of one of the books in his "Game of Thrones" series ("A Song of Ice and Fire").  I would be remiss if I didn't also mention the great rock-n-roll tune by the artist Pat Benatar ("Fire and Ice").

In my opinion, "Fire and Ice" is one of Frost's great poems.