Today’s Poem: Fire and Ice

A masterclass in verbs

John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath, 1851 (Tate Britain)

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Fire and Ice

by Robert Frost

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.

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In 1960, the Harvard astronomer (and Soviet fellow-traveler) Harlow Shapley (1885–1972) claimed to have inspired the 1920 poem “Fire and Ice.” In Shapley’s telling, at a chance meeting, Robert Frost (1874–1963) asked him how the world would end. And a year after telling Frost that the Earth would die either incinerated in the explosion of the sun or frozen in the spread of the universe’s total entropy, Shapley saw “Fire and Ice” in print. Thus, he concluded, the poem “illustrates one of the many ways in which scientific knowledge can influence the creation of a work of art and also elucidate the meaning of that work of art.”

The learn’d astronomer got the first part right, probably: He may have given Frost two of the four elements of the analogy that shapes the poem. But about the second claim, that science elucidates the meaning, Shapley was looking through the wrong end of his telescope. The poem is far less about astrophysics (diminished with the opening “Some say”) than it is about the human heart. The astronomy is a frame: Fire:Desire::Ice:Hate — as fire is to desire, so ice is to hate.

The voice of the poem is wry (and notice that when the tone starts to grow serious, Frost immediately deflates it with the talky distancing irony of “if it had to perish twice” after the description of fire, and “Is also great” after ice). But masked by that irony is a confession of the speaker of the poem, a highly personal admission of having felt desire as strong as apocalyptic flame and having known hate as complete as the heat death of the world. Covered over by the wry voice, there is, perhaps, a kind of acceptance of the end of the world, and acknowledgement of his sinful nature, in the poem’s concluding “And would suffice.”

Sinful is an appropriate word if we accept the idea that the poem is referencing Dante’s Inferno. Put most exhaustively in a 1999 article by John N. Serio, this reading notices that the poem is in terza rima (of a sort: The rhyme pattern is aba-abc-bcb, which is not quite Dante’s aba-bcb-cdc, and Frost’s meter varies from tetrameter to dimeter, with six four-beat lines and three two-beat lines). Plus there are nine lines to the poem, like the nine circles of Hell, and elements of Frost’s poem might be identified with various sins through the descent to the lowest circle in the Inferno.

I’m not persuaded by this reading. Or, at least, I think it right that Frost was gesturing toward Dante; the terza rima makes that almost certain. But I shy from any claim that the connection is exact, multipronged, and entirely serious. What I think we should take from the poem (first published in Harper’s in 1920 and then in Frost’s 1923 collection New Hampshire) is something like a masterclass in how to use verbs to build an analogy in a poem.

When Frost writes, “From what I’ve tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire,” we’re given three verbs to convey the idea that desire is like fire: tasted, hold, and favor. And they are all desirous, consuming actions, the appropriateness of each hidden beneath the poem’s apparent use of their secondary meanings as experienced, agree with, and tend to accept. And for the ice, Frost opens with three verbs of non-physical action — think, know, say — as though to suggest that hate is a feature of a cold mind.

Robert Frost, c. 1915 (Wikimedia Commons)

In 1959, the critic Lionel Trilling spoke at a dinner celebrating Frost’s 85th birthday, saying, “I have to say that my Frost . . . is not the Frost I seem to perceive in the minds of so many of his admirers. He is not the Frost who reassures us by his affirmation of old virtues, old simplicities and ways of feeling.” In fact, Trilling said, Frost is “a terrifying poet.”

“Fire and Ice” has its humor, its wryness, and its irony, all to undercut and dismiss as incidental the end of the world. From the opening “Some say” to the closing “would suffice,” a vague scientific apocalypse, far in the future, generates no real terror. But under that, in the verbs carrying the analogy forward to describe the human heart, there’s still Frost’s terrifying poetry.

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