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Essay“Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost

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If you had a choice on how the world should end, what would you decide? Would your choice be to go painfully but fast or slow and painless? That’s what I believe Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice” is meant to express. Although the poem is short, it holds a very interesting question to think about. What way would you prefer the world to end? There are two choices. 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 …show more content…

In the first line of the poem, “Some say the world will end in fire”, this is where I compared the stanza to my assumption. In the Bible, the book of Revelations also says that the next time that God comes for his people; he is going to destroy the world with fire. This is the biblical aspect of the poem. For Robert Frost, poetry and life are 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 brings us closer to life with the compression of feeling and emotion in such few words.

Fire and Ice by Robert Frost | Some say the world will end in fire
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
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.

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