Fire and Ice

Summary

Fire and Ice is a nine-line lyric that Robert Frost first printed in Harper's Magazine in December 1920 and collected three years later among the short Grace Notes of New Hampshire (1923), the book that won him his first Pulitzer Prize. It is one of his most anthologized poems and one of the briefest. The poem opens by reporting a disagreement about the end of the world. Some people say it will end in fire, and some say in ice. The speaker does not settle the question with science or prophecy. He settles it from experience: from what he has tasted of desire, he holds with those who favor fire. Then he widens the claim. If the world had to perish twice, he says, he knows enough of hate to judge that ice would also be great for destruction, and would suffice. The poem quietly pairs each element with a passion. Fire is desire, the hot and grasping appetites that consume. Ice is hate, the cold, hard, withholding passions that freeze. Both are already at work in the human heart, and the speaker admits he has met them there himself. A question about cosmic catastrophe becomes a question about the soul, and the threat comes from inside rather than from the stars. Much of the poem's force lies in its tone. The vocabulary is plain, the lines grow shorter as the poem goes cold, and the last words, would suffice, are almost a shrug. That understatement makes the conclusion more unsettling than a shout would be. Frost uses only three rhyme sounds in nine lines, so the words fire, ice, and hate keep echoing. For a classical Christian classroom, the poem opens a conversation about the passions and the deadly sins, about Dante's frozen lowest circle of Hell, and about the warning in the Gospels that the love of many shall wax cold. It also invites honest notice of what the poem leaves out: it names the destruction and offers no rescue.

Top Lessons

• The end of the world begins in the heart

  Frost turns a question about how the world will end into a question about the passions. Desire is fire and hate is ice, and the speaker knows both from the inside. Students can see that great evils in history usually grow from ordinary sins left unchecked.

• Understatement can be louder than a shout

  The poem ends with the mild words is also great and would suffice. Saying less than the situation deserves forces the reader to supply the horror. Students should practice hearing tone as well as reading words.

• Hot sins and cold sins

  The Christian tradition has long distinguished sins of heat, like lust, greed, and rage, from sins of coldness, like envy, contempt, and indifference. Dante froze the worst sinners in ice. Frost's pairing gives students a memorable way to examine both kinds of disorder in their own lives.

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