Daniel Im

IB Lang 12

Moosman4

Fire and Ice Analysis

The poem overall is about how the speaker says the world will end, either through fire or

ice. The speaker “favors” or believes that fire will be the way the world will go. One of the first

techniques used is rhyming. For example, “desire” and “fire'' are used in adjacent lines to each

other, which is called a couplet. This couplet shows that there is a connection between the two

words. Within desire, there is a burning passion to achieve a goal. A desire for humans can be

world ending. For instance, we humans desire to achieve a long prosperous life and will do

anything in our power to achieve this. We are willing to destroy the world’s ecosystem to benefit

our own lives by letting it grow worse and worse, such as global warming. However, the poem

continues on saying that if the world was to perish twice, ice would be the cause. The speaker

states, “I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction of ice” (Frost, 6-7). This idea of

how the author knows enough about hatred and relates it to hatred means that our human rage

and anger will cause the downfall of the earth as well. Humans have developed many weapons as

a response to rage and anger, especially to use in wars. The ice could be referring to the idea of a

nuclear winter because of how winter has ice within it and how a nuclear world is practically the

end of that world. Overall between these two ideas, fire is more belief based while ice is more

science based. There are ideas of human’s creations will end the world while in others, religions

say that is how the world will end and is a belief. All of these are all opinion based and are

reasonable to an extent between one another. In the end of the poem, the writer finishes off the

poem with two quick and short lines, “Is also great, And would suffice”(Frost,8-9). This is
referring to the end of the world and how it will be short and quick. Overall, this poem was the

speaker’s perspective about the ending of the world and uses certain language choices

contributing even more to the text making it have even more possible meanings behind it.