Fire and Ice by Robert Frost

FIRE and ICE

                   -Robert Frost

                   "Fire and Ice" is one of Robert Frost's best-known poems, but it feels more modern than some of his other famous works, like "The Road Not Taken" and "After Apple-Picking." You get no sense of the quaint New England lifestyle that many people associate with Frost.
                   The poem describes a fictional debate between people who say that the world will end in fire and people who say it will end in ice. The debate is highly symbolic, despite the claims of a Harvard astronomer named Harlow Shapley who thought the poem was based on a conversation he had with Frost in which he explained how "life on earth" would be extinguished either through "incineration" or a "permanent ice age".

                   The speaker brings us into the middle of an argument between people who think the world will come to a fiery end and people who think the world will freeze. He could be talking about the literal end of the world, but he's also talking about the power that human beings have to harm or "destroy" one another.
                   The speaker's experience with romantic desire has taught him that passionate or "hot" emotions like love and lust would probably have the power to turn the earth into a big fireball. But he has also experienced the other extreme, and he knows that colder emotions like hate have great destructive power. Love gets all the publicity, but hate is the silent killer. It may not have the same grandeur as the fireball ending, but it'll do the trick.

                   "Fire and Ice" is set up as a choice between fire and ice. Which force will bring about the end of the world? Based on the wisdom gained from his experience, the speaker decides that desire and the other forces of "fire" would probably bring about the destruction of the world first. "Fire," after all, is the realm of the passions, which are spontaneous and impulsive. But the cool deliberation of "ice" would be no less effective at bringing about destruction. The speaker makes a choice but avoids choosing one over the other. "Fire and Ice" is notable for the lack of fear on the part of the speaker, who responds to the prospect of the end of the world with few traces of emotion or worry. He takes it all in stride. There is something uncomfortable and even frightening about a guy who can analyze the pivotal moment in human history like a lawyer or judge weighing two arguments. Nonetheless, from his personal knowledge of desire and hate, we know the speaker is not just naïve. Maybe he knows "fire and ice" so well that he has moved beyond fear to resignation. Or maybe the fear is still lurking beneath the surface.

                   "Desire" is meant to be closely associated with love. Of course, love has many other sides: commitment, affection, and responsibility, to name a few. But desire is one of the most fundamental emotional responses to being in love, and it's also the most potentially destructive. You can think of desire as a huge store of energy that can be channeled or directed in many different ways. "Fire and Ice" argues that, if channeled in the wrong way, desire could bring about the end of the world. There are other kinds of desire than erotic love – you can desire a cool sports car, for example – but romantic desire is probably the most powerful. Many readers of "Fire and Ice" – including us – think Frost was inspired partly by the image of malicious sinners trapped in ice at the bottom of Dante's Hell in his epic poem the Inferno. Contrary to the fire-and-brimstone view that the worst of the worst are tortured by flames for all eternity, Dante locks these folks up in a frozen lake. Some kinds of hate can be hot, like the hate of a jealous lover, but usually the most malicious forms of hate are seen as cold, like icy, premeditated revenge. Unlike love, which shouts its name through the streets, hate works in the shadows.