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.
Summary
The speaker considers the age-old question of whether
the world will end in fire or in ice. This is similar to another
age-old question: whether it would be preferable to freeze to death
or burn to death. The speaker determines that either option would
achieve its purpose sufficiently well.
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 7to
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.
