FIRE AND ICE by Robert Frost

Reading the title without reading the poem I aspect it may be about something hot and something cold, such as passion, love and desire for fire and death, end and destruction for ice.

It may be about relationships, the end of the world or the end of a feeling. Indeed, when you are in love it is called fiery passion and when you don’t fell anything anymore, it is called cold like ice.

The word “and” connects two opposite words, beacuse “fire” is linked to something hot and “ice” to something cold. The poet juxtapposes them because they both have a strong power on everybody’s life.

Looking at the text you can understand that it is a poem because it is arranged into stanzas.

The poem is arranged into three stanzas. The first two consist of two lines, called couplets and the last one consist of five lines.

The first two stanzas have got similiar patterns: they have the same synthattical structure and the same anaphoric structure (“Some say”).

In the first stanza, the poet expressed the people opinion, while in the second one he expressed his opinion. He agrees with the people who think that the world will end in fire because he has experienced of desire (passion and love).

The opinion is precisely the element that binds the first two stanzas.

In the first two stanzas the poet tells about fire while in the last one he tells about ice, indeed he speak about perish and destruction. Perish are connected to die because when you die, your body is likes ice.

In the first two lines there is an anaphora, indeed there is a repetition of “Some say” which also has an alliterative sound.

The last stanza is completely composed of enjambment, indeed you can read it all in one breath, without pausing.

The rhyme scheme is ABA ABC BCB with “ice” repeated twice and also contained within “twice” and “suffice”.

Many of the words used by the poet are simple words like world, fire, ice, desire, hate and destruction, but there are also very complex words like perish and suffice. This makes you understand that the poet used different linguistic registers.

As for the word “great” used in the penultimate line, it refers to moral and ethical minings and it is an ironical use of the word.