Fire and Ice (Criticism)

Criticism

Bruce Meyer

Bruce Meyer is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Toronto. He has taught at several Canadian universities and is the author of three collections of poetry. In the following essay, Meyer analyzes Frost’s “Fire and Ice,” drawing parallels to Dante’s Inferno.

In his 1925 poem “The Hollow Men,” T. S. Eliot declared that the world would end “Not with a bang but a whimper.” Eliot’s played-out version of finality suggests dissipation, a world that is spent and futile. Robert Frost, on the other hand, suggests that the intensity of human passion and the raw power of nature are eternal forces. According to physics, after all, energy is never lost, it is only transferred from one thing to another. True to Frost’s idea of the endless cycles of nature in which Man is eternally locked, it is no wonder that his vision of the end of things in “Fire and Ice” is a statement about the power of human emotion and its endless capacity to make itself recognized and felt. For the persona of Frost’s poem who has “tasted of desire,” the world of human passion, whether love or hate, is indomitable.

Biographer Jeffrey Meyers points out in Robert Frost (1996) that Frost based his short, nine-line poem on a passage from Dante’s “Canto 32” of the Divine Comedy’s Inferno. In the source passage from Dante’s work, the “betrayers of their own kind are plunged, while in a fiery hell, up to their necks in ice.” Indeed, the center of Dante’s hell is made of ice; it is a place where the kinetic and frenetic passions of human beings are stilled just enough for them to meditate for an eternity on their wrongs. In this Dantean punishment, the “sinners are preserved in ice.” Frost says that “ice” will “suffice,” and Meyers points out that Frost’s use of the rhyme, in this case, is meant to underscore the natural sense of understatement in the word “suffice.”

The poem “Fire and Ice” is more complex than it seems at first glance. The very vagueness of the opening word, “Some,” locates the ideas of the poem in that vague, open-ended world of hearsay or speculation. It is remarkable how many of Frost’s poems are located in a reality that is less than concrete. Frost loves the realm of the speculative — the plastic, inner cosmos of internal monologue, second thought, and pensive rumination. And, true to Frost’s tendencies, even the initial “Some” is undercut by a second “Some” in the second line. What one must remember is that Frost is a great debater of ideas; he weighs opposing arguments. Rarely, in his poems, is there a single-minded line of thought. In this world of ideas and contraries, “fire” is set against “ice” in much the same way that the two neighbors are set on opposite sides of the fence in his “Mending Wall.” In the outcome of the debate between “fire” and “ice,” the persona of the poem decides that he must “hold with those who favor fire,” but then goes back upon his own decision and mediates it with his realization that “ice / Is also great / And would suffice.”

For Frost, particularly in this poem, the stance is that of the outsider, in much the same way that Dante’s condemned sufferers of the Inferno are outcasts from the central order of things who have had time and distance to reflect on their individual wills and choice of destinies and weigh those choices with knowledge and understanding. When the persona of the poem goes back on his initial position of believing that “the world will end in fire,” he is just mediating his ideas; he is reflecting on the situation from the experience of his own life. On this level, the poem suddenly becomes a very drastically understated reevaluation of the persona’s life, a self-judgment that, for the little that is said, is as harsh as any judgment meted out to those sad souls floundering in the muck of their former psychoses in Dante’s Malabowges.

Suddenly, “Fire and Ice” is not just a consideration of how the world will end or even a detached, theological commentary on contemporary spiritual vapidity; it is also a stunning self-indictment on the power of passion within an individual. The persona interjects in line 3 with a very personal, experiential note: “From what I’ve tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire.” The poem has, rhetorically, moved from being an overview of hearsay to being a personal statement on the experience of desire. At this point, however, the movement of the argument shifts again: “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.” In a very short space, the poem is transformed from being a statement about how the world will end, to a muffled reminiscence on desire, to a commentary on the nature of hatred. The speaker does not elaborate on what events caused him to be hated or loved in the first place. He does not need to elaborate, because the poem, through this manner of emotional ellipsis, becomes a poem not about endings but of continuations. Frost’s thesis in the poem, as was Dante’s, is that “the evil that men do live after them” (Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar) and that human emotions, both good and bad, are unending.

Not only has the persona felt hated, he alludes to the fact that something — that was of value in his life — has been destroyed. The very iciness of the absence that has been created (an iciness far more sinister than the storms that break the branches of the birches in “Birches,” an absence almost as puzzling and troubling as the absence of the wood piler in “The Wood Pile”) is masked by the word “suffice.” “Suffice,” in its very casual sense, implies that something is complete or has run its course but that it could still do with more or could still be continuing in some way. In the case of “Fire and Ice,” the reader is not told what that something is, yet it is apparent that what happened was somehow “sufficient,” though there may be more to it than what is described.

What is both troubling and beautiful about “Fire and Ice” is how little is says while saying a great deal. This paradox is a challenge to the reader. In this moot court where fire is weighed against ice, in this place where the instruments of emotional destruction are measured and compared, Frost issues a conundrum, a perplexing question, as to which is greater. To answer that question is, in many ways, an over-reading of the poem. The

issue is not which — fire or ice — is greater, though the reader is left with that question to mull over, and the presentation of a question in a poem is always good for prolonging the consideration of a poem’s central issues. But this prolongation is a deflection. The real issue is not which is greater but how great and resilient human emotions really are.

Dante’s cosmos is a place where life continues after life, where one cannot run away from one’s past actions. The Divine Comedy is, perhaps, the greatest study in cause-and-effect relationships in literature. Frost has taken this issue up in “Fire and Ice” through ellipsis — by not saying what he is really feeling or thinking, but merely weighing two very different elements of destruction. On a very subtle level, Frost may be giving away his sense of which is greater, fire or ice, in the rhyme scheme of the poem. “Fire” and “ice” are repeated twice, and, rhetorically, when items in a poem are repeated twice, the repetitions are usually for emphasis — a gesture where the poet draws particular attention to an idea or an image, almost as if he is repeating it in case the reader missed it or didn’t get it the first time. The subtle clue to the issue of which is greater may lie in the rhyme words that Frost chooses to associate with “fire” and “ice.” “Fire” is rhymed with “desire,” a rhyme that suggests the heat of passion — the destructive intensity of something that is both consuming yet sustaining at the same time. “Ice” is rhymed with “twice,” almost as if the poet is trying to let us in on his little joke of repetitions. The two end rhymes not associated with either “fire” or “ice” are “hate” and “great,” as if to say that hatred is something entirely destructive, impassionate, and cold. “Hate” and “great” are also associated with the “ice” half of the syllogism the poem forms, and the suggestion here is that “ice” is the worst of the two elements because it neither sustains nor consumes what it touches, but merely makes things inanimate and perpetual. That is why Dante put ice at the center of his hell and why Frost chooses to comment on the ultimate destructiveness of hatred as a human passion. The betrayers of “Canto 32” — Brutus, Cassius, and Judas — are consumed by Satan like popsicles on a hot summer day, yet they are perpetually preserved so that their torment is everlasting. In this light, it is almost as if Frost is saying that love and desire run their course, but hatred is permanent. Like the ice of Dante’s innermost Malabowge, the ice of Frost’s little poem never seems to go away. It can “suffice” because there is always something more to it — something preserving, chilling, and imperishable.

Source: Bruce Meyer, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

What Do I Read Next?

• This Fabulous Century: 1920-30 by Time-Life Books, published in 1969, is a good introduction to the period. The brief text highlights majors figures, trends, and fads, providing a vivid visual portrait of a flamboyant and controversial decade.
• Scott E. Hastings introduces fiercely independent farmers and artisans clinging to an archaic way of life that is frequently presented in Frost’s poetry in The Last Yankees: Folkways in Eastern Vermont and the Border Country (1990).
• Centennial Essays, compiled by the Committee on the Frost Centennial of the University of Southern Mississippi in 1970, includes forty-one articles that give an excellent overview, focusing on Frost’s achievement, his views on nature, themes, contexts, methods, theories, and religion. The collection contains biographical articles and reminiscences as well.
• In the 1999 biography Robert Frost: A Life, Jay Parini provides a sympathetic and readable portrait that includes an insightful analysis of Frost’s poetry.
• Frost is often compared to Edwin Arlington Robinson, another New England poet of the same period. Robinson’s Selected Poems, published in 1997, provides an opportunity to compare and contrast his poetry with Frost’s.