FIRE AND ICE
The poem has got a title which can be interpreted in thousands of different ways. First of all, considering the connotative meaning, they can be opposite feelings. For example, fire, red, can be associated to passion and ice to cold, but they could also mean love and hate. Briefly, the title suggests a lot of opposites, so that it leaves us a large possibility to interpret the poem before we read it. The poem is made of one stanza only, which consists of nine lines. The poem starts with “some say” so the first speaker are probably people, human beings in general. In the first two lines the poem shows two different point of view. The fact that both lines begin with “Some say”, this alliteration makes the first lines stick into the reader’s mind. “People” discuss on which will be the end of the world, and the poet is in favour of the ones who say “fire”. It is interesting to notice that most of the lines end with fire, ice, hate, so that the main characters of the poem (fire and ice) are not abandoned, but they return during the poem. When the second speaker, the poet, starts to speak, we notice that he’s probably not happy of his life. He says he thinks he knows enough of hate, therefore he links “hate” to ice, in the following line, saying that ice is enough to make the word end. The run on line in the last two lines makes the poem end in a negative way, in my opinion. It gives you the sense of a tragic end. In conclusion, according to what the poet has written, he’s probably a person who’s not very happy and has got a weird way to see the world, he has got a dramatic conception of the world!