Complete 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 it had to perish twice, 5
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Form
"Fire and Ice" follows an invented form, irregularly interweaving three rhymes
and two line lengths into a poem of nine lines. Each line ends either with an
-ire, -ice, or -ate rhyme. Each line contains either four
or eight syllables. Each line can be read naturally as iambic, although this is
not strictly necessary for several lines. Frost employs strong enjambment in
line 7 to great effect.
Commentary
An extremely compact little lyric, "Fire and Ice" combines humor, fury,
detachment, forthrightness, and reserve in an airtight package. Not a syllable
is wasted. The aim is aphorism--the slaying of the elusive Truth-beast with one
unerring stroke. But for Frost, as usual, the truth remains ambiguous and the
question goes unanswered; to settle for aphorism would be to oversimplify.
We can attribute part of the poem's effect to the contrast between the simple,
clipped precision of its vocabulary and the vague gravity of its subject. The
real triumph of "Fire and Ice," however, is in its form. Try writing the poem
out in prose lines. Nearly all poems suffer considerably in this exercise, but
this poem simply dies:
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.
The language remains simple, but the devastating, soaring anticlimax of the
final two lines is lost. Those lines draw their soft-kill power from form: from
their rhymes; from the juxtaposition of their short, punchy length with that of
the preceding lines (and their resonance with the length of the second line);
and from the strong enjambment in line 7, which builds up the tension needed for
the perfect letdown.
It is one thing to pull off an offhand remark about the end of days; it is
another to make it poetry. Frost masterfully accomplishes both in a single
composition.
