Fire and Ice

Also in “Fire and Ice” Frost says that “But if I had to parish twice/I think I know enough of hate/To say that for destruction ice/Is also great/And would suffice” (lines 5-9). What Frost is saying with this part of the poem is that if he could die twice he then choose the ice because he knows the hate that ice is equated with. When someone feels hate there is a general feeling of coldness or “Ice”. “Frost is saying that he could stand dying through the coldness of hate.”

When I first read this poem, I also was reading the bible. I asked my father, an ordained pastor, what he thought of the poem and he gave me his two points of view. The view that stood out the most was the Biblical point of view. In the Bible it is told that God destroyed Earth with water the first time he came to get his people (the story of Noah’s Ark). Since ice is a form of water, my dad, related the two to each other. In the Bible, the book of Revelations also say that the next time that God comes to take his people that he is going to destroy the world by fire. This is the biblical aspect of the poem.

As I read the poem further to get a deeper understanding I thought of other relations to the poem Fire and Ice. I was thinking that Frost wanted to basically put a question on our minds, If you had to choose a way to die would you choose fire or ice? In lines seven through nine, “To say that destruction ice is also great and would suffice”. To me this is saying you would have to choose the lesser of the two evils. Weighting the pros and cons of the two. Asking which one is better for you, a cold slow death or a hot slow death. But in the end of the poem Frost is saying the no matter which one he picks they are both going to give you the same results, death.

To analyze the poem better I took each word as if it symbolized a certain characteristic. In lines three and four, “From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold those who favor fire” it led me to believe that Frost was trying to use desire as a metaphor to fire. Desire, can usually be used a negative or a positive manner depending on the context it’s use. In the poem I think that Frost is using it in a negative sense, because he is uses words like end, perish, and destruction in the poem. Negatively the word desire can mean the drive to