Literary Analysis Of Robert Frost's Fire And Ice

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One said, "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words." Four time Pulitzer Prize winning American poet, teacher, and lecturer, Robert Frost quoted this. Frost was born in 1874 and died in January of 1963. He lived in New England for practically his whole life, only moving to England for a short time to pursue his writing career in which he wrote many popular and oft-quoted poems. In his poem, "Fire and Ice", Frost uses imagery, diction and metaphors to create the themes of desire and hate, nature and its meaning, and opposites. "Fire and Ice" Poetry for Students states that the poem does not have a pastoral setting. (Fire and Ice 56) It is one of the very few of Frost poems that doesn 't. (56) The …show more content…

("Fire and Ice" 60) It is represented as abaabcbcb. (60) That means that line one rhymes with lines three and four, line two rhymes with lines five, seven and nine, and line six rhymes with line eight. (60) Bruce Meyer discovers that there is also meaning behind these rhymes. "Fire" is rhymed with "desire" so that we get that feeling of passion, "the destructive intensity of something that is both consuming yet sustaining at the same time". (Meyer 64) "Ice" is rhymed with "twice" emphasizing his repetitions of "fire" and "Ice". …show more content…

(Fire and Ice 58) In the nine short lines of the poem, Frost gives the possibility of two different versions of the same catastrophe. (Leger 113) The fact that the world will end is not questioned, only the manner of the destruction is yet to be determined.
In his poem “Fire and Ice”, Robert Frost compares and contrasts the two destructive forces: fire and ice. In the first two lines of the poem he presents two options for the end of the world, “Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice”. I feel that he uses the term fire, not to hold the direct meaning of a burning flame, but to represent the punishment something can inflict upon an object. It presents the image of the intense pain in which a burn can impose, along with the extraordinary speed in which it happens. Fire causes a tremendous amount of destruction to virtually anything, within seconds. It could also just represent a violent ending. For the world to end in ice, seems to present the image of a slower, numbing effect. I feel he uses ice to symbolize a deliberate, almost unnoticeable change that eventually causes the destruction of

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