POEM : "Fire and Ice" *
PUBLISHED : circa 1923
POET : Robert Frost (1874- 1963)
TEXT :
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 I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
NOTES
"FIre and Ice" is but nine lines of 51 words (one word less than Lincoln's Address) with only five denotative common nouns : fire, ice, desire, hate, and destruction. These five nouns are the five elements of the poem, and they carry the message of the poem like a carrier pigeon : one wing of fire/desire, another of ice/hate. Of pronouns, there are only four : one personal pronoun :" I"; one demonstrative pronoun : "those" ; and two indefinite pronouns : "some" , and "it". The poem reminds me of poems chiseled into granite New England tombstones in the Shaker villages of Massachusetts, artistic footnotes to lives long lived and piously suffered.
Fire and Ice, I think, is in this tradition : brevity of expression, surface simplicity, philosophic depth, wry understatement, all of which are taught as the Frostian signature as well as the New England mode of communication. Like the stonecutters and craftman of the mid-19th century New England, Frost left New England for the gold of somewhere else, in his case, the American communal clusters of literati in Europe at the turn of the 20th century. He returned to New England 2 years later, an expatriate re-patriated to the fire and ice of New England weather and the hot and cold of American politics, to try his hand at farming. That too was short-lived. He turned his hand to writing poetry.
Have you ever have tried to write poetry in breath-cold, un-insulated cabins of New England? The very air demands long concentrations and brief exposition. It sharpens the mind as it numbs your fingers. Maybe that's why I like this poem, aside from its craftsmanship. What I think this poem is about is the experience of extremes, the extreme's of "warmth : extreme excess, extreme lack." That polarity dominates the poem. And while excesses may be typical of New England weather, the narrator, however, is not Frost himself living in New England, but someone, the "I", living in the "world" where (s)he has experienced those polarities. The I, of course, is you and me, the voice of humanity speaking in simple words of deep wisdom, like the narrator in Blake, or Dickinson. We have all tasted desire, we have all known hate, we have all participated in the destruction of the world. We burn people with our desire and we chill them with our hate. The narrator is expressing a formula here re-enforced by the structure of the poem on the page.
Fire and ice end line 1 and line 2, respectively : the thesis lines, the proposition. Desire and fire are linked as rhyming end words at lines 3 and 4 respectively ; hate and ice are linked as unrhymed end words at line 6 and 7 respectively. I am rushing at "the meaning" here, obviously, but I want to get to the enigma of line 5 : "But if I had to perish twice//," the kernel line, the line from which for me the message or significance of the poem radiates. To get at this lines import, cut and paste : take out "if I had to perish twice//," leaving line 6 to absorb the "but" into itself so line 6 would read "But I think I know enough of hate//." Omitting the enigma omits the vital suggestion that hatred leads to two deaths. And the ponderousness of two deaths is re-enforced by semantic contrast : sensation/softness of the fire choice (taste,desire,favor- pun on flavor?- fire) with hardness of the mental/ice choice(I think I know), where "ice" and great" get heavy end line emphasis because of the awkwardly divided three word lines of both line 8 and 9 ("Is also great//And would surfice"//).
So what do we now know from the narrator. We know now that the world dies once from desire, twice from hatred. Can we now interpolate what the second death might be? Even if we haven't explicated what the first one is? I think not. We have this same problem in St. Francis of Assisi's "Canticle", don't we? And we've had this same problem in the New Testament with writers talking about being born again.
Birth and death: fire and ice; still an enigma.
*From : Modern American and British Poetry, ed. by Louis Untermeyer,
Harcourt,Brace and World, N.Y., 1955, page 59.
_________________________________________________________
PUBLISHED : circa 1923
POET : Robert Frost (1874- 1963)
TEXT :
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 I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
NOTES
"FIre and Ice" is but nine lines of 51 words (one word less than Lincoln's Address) with only five denotative common nouns : fire, ice, desire, hate, and destruction. These five nouns are the five elements of the poem, and they carry the message of the poem like a carrier pigeon : one wing of fire/desire, another of ice/hate. Of pronouns, there are only four : one personal pronoun :" I"; one demonstrative pronoun : "those" ; and two indefinite pronouns : "some" , and "it". The poem reminds me of poems chiseled into granite New England tombstones in the Shaker villages of Massachusetts, artistic footnotes to lives long lived and piously suffered.
Fire and Ice, I think, is in this tradition : brevity of expression, surface simplicity, philosophic depth, wry understatement, all of which are taught as the Frostian signature as well as the New England mode of communication. Like the stonecutters and craftman of the mid-19th century New England, Frost left New England for the gold of somewhere else, in his case, the American communal clusters of literati in Europe at the turn of the 20th century. He returned to New England 2 years later, an expatriate re-patriated to the fire and ice of New England weather and the hot and cold of American politics, to try his hand at farming. That too was short-lived. He turned his hand to writing poetry.
Have you ever have tried to write poetry in breath-cold, un-insulated cabins of New England? The very air demands long concentrations and brief exposition. It sharpens the mind as it numbs your fingers. Maybe that's why I like this poem, aside from its craftsmanship. What I think this poem is about is the experience of extremes, the extreme's of "warmth : extreme excess, extreme lack." That polarity dominates the poem. And while excesses may be typical of New England weather, the narrator, however, is not Frost himself living in New England, but someone, the "I", living in the "world" where (s)he has experienced those polarities. The I, of course, is you and me, the voice of humanity speaking in simple words of deep wisdom, like the narrator in Blake, or Dickinson. We have all tasted desire, we have all known hate, we have all participated in the destruction of the world. We burn people with our desire and we chill them with our hate. The narrator is expressing a formula here re-enforced by the structure of the poem on the page.
Fire and ice end line 1 and line 2, respectively : the thesis lines, the proposition. Desire and fire are linked as rhyming end words at lines 3 and 4 respectively ; hate and ice are linked as unrhymed end words at line 6 and 7 respectively. I am rushing at "the meaning" here, obviously, but I want to get to the enigma of line 5 : "But if I had to perish twice//," the kernel line, the line from which for me the message or significance of the poem radiates. To get at this lines import, cut and paste : take out "if I had to perish twice//," leaving line 6 to absorb the "but" into itself so line 6 would read "But I think I know enough of hate//." Omitting the enigma omits the vital suggestion that hatred leads to two deaths. And the ponderousness of two deaths is re-enforced by semantic contrast : sensation/softness of the fire choice (taste,desire,favor- pun on flavor?- fire) with hardness of the mental/ice choice(I think I know), where "ice" and great" get heavy end line emphasis because of the awkwardly divided three word lines of both line 8 and 9 ("Is also great//And would surfice"//).
So what do we now know from the narrator. We know now that the world dies once from desire, twice from hatred. Can we now interpolate what the second death might be? Even if we haven't explicated what the first one is? I think not. We have this same problem in St. Francis of Assisi's "Canticle", don't we? And we've had this same problem in the New Testament with writers talking about being born again.
Birth and death: fire and ice; still an enigma.
*From : Modern American and British Poetry, ed. by Louis Untermeyer,
Harcourt,Brace and World, N.Y., 1955, page 59.
_________________________________________________________