Analysis of Robert Frost's Fire and Ice

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Analysis of Robert Frost's Fire and Ice

For Robert Frost, poetry and life

were one and the same. In an interview he said, 'One thing I care about,

and wish young people could care about, is taking poetry as the first form

of understanding.' Each Robert Frost poem strikes a chord somewhere, each

poem bringing us closer to life with the compression of feeling and

emotion into so few words. This essay will focus on one particular poem,

the meaning of which has been much debated due to the quantity of words

used, or the lack there-of.

There have been many readers of Frost's poem "Fire and Ice", thus

being interpreted in many ways. Many readers would interpret the poem to

mean something about 'the physical end of the world, or the end of the

physical world' (1). Lawrence Thompson views the poem as hinting at the

destructive powers in "the heat of love or passion and the cold of hate,"

sensing that "these two extremes are made so to encompass life as to be a

gathering up of all that may exist between them; all that may be swept

away by them" (2).

Upon closer examination of "Fire and Ice", I found a distinct

parallel that closely mirrors the tale of Dante's Inferno. The Inferno is

the first part of Dante Alighieri's poem, the Divine Comedy, which

chronicles Dante's journey to God, and is made up of The Inferno (Hell),

Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise). In The Inferno, Dante

begins his journey on the surface of the Earth, guided by the Ro...

... middle of paper ...

.... Much later, and in what I think is

'a veiled tribute to Robert Frost', John Ciardi translates these lines

as(2):

I come to lead you to the other shore,

into eternal dark, into fire and ice. (3.83-84)

Works Cited:

http://www.epcc.edu/Faculty/joeo/fire_scientific.htm. Online. Netscape

Navigator. Feb. 4, 2001.

Thompson, Lawrance. Fire and Ice: The Art and Thought of Robert Frost.

New York: Henry Holt, 1942.

Dante Alighieri. The Inferno. Trans John Ciardi. New York: Mentor, 1954.

Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Vols. 9-11.

Trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

http://www.divinecomedy.org. Online. Netscape Navigator. Feb. 5,

2001.

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