robert frost analysis essay

A Summary and Analysis of Robert Frost’s ‘Fire and Ice’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Fire and Ice’ is one of the best-known and most widely anthologised poems by the American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963). The poem has a symbolic, even allegorical quality to it, which makes more sense when it is analysed in its literary and historical context. Frost wrote ‘Fire and Ice’ in 1920, and it was published in Harper’s Magazine in December of that year.

You can read ‘Fire and Ice’ here before proceeding to our analysis of the poem below.

The elements of fire and ice mentioned in the poem, and foregrounded in its title, are two of the four Aristotelian or classical elements, along with earth and air (although ‘ice’ is usually just described as water, Frost – whose very surname here summons the icy conditions of one half of the poem – is purposely summoning these classical elements).

In summary, ‘Fire and Ice’ is a nine-line poem in which Frost tells us that he has heard some people say that the world will end in fire, while others reckon it will end in ice. In other words, the world will either burn up or freeze up. Frost’s speaker goes on to assert that his own view is that fire is more likely, especially in light of his experiences of desire (which is often linked with fire and heat, e.g. we talk of ‘burning with desire’ for someone).

However, ice comes a close second for him: he’s also experienced enough of the destructive power of cold, icy hatred to see how that might consume the world, too, and be sufficient to destroy it.

We said that fire and ice are perhaps more allegorical than symbolic in Frost’s poem, because rather than leaving these deeply symbolic forces of fire and ice open to speculation and different interpretations, he goes on to link them very specifically to two particular emotions: desire for fire, and hate for ice.

In other words, will humans destroy the world through hating each other so much that we all kill each other? Or will passionate desire actually destroy everything?

In other words, what begins in rather elemental, open-ended terms (perhaps even inviting us to think of global warming, something unknown to Frost, when we read of the world ending in fire) comes to have a distinctly human aspect, grounded in human emotions and behaviour.

What makes ‘Fire and Ice’ such a haunting and even troubling poem is its acknowledgment that desire and passion can be more deadly and destructive than mere hate: hate (‘ice’) may well consume us all through war (we need only look at how religious and political differences can make whole groups of people hate their neighbours), but desire (‘fire’) may prove even more powerful because it can provide the zeal, the irrational belief in something, that will fuel even more destructive behaviour.

Frost wrote ‘Fire and Ice’ in 1920. This is just two years after the end of the First World War, and a time when revolution, apocalypse, and social and political chaos were on many people’s minds. And especially on poets’ minds.

A year earlier, W. B. Yeats had written ‘The Second Coming’, with its famous declaration, ‘ Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold ’, and its assertion that a ‘second coming’ must be ‘at hand’, with some sphinx-like creature slowly making its way towards Bethlehem to be born as a second Christ.

Five years after Frost wrote ‘Fire and Ice’, T. S. Eliot would offer his own version of apocalypse in ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925): ‘ This is the way the world ends ’, he says, famously, ‘Not with a bang but a whimper.’ ‘Fire and Ice’ should be seen in the broader literary context of these ‘apocalyptic’ poems.

‘Fire and Ice’ was supposedly the inspiration for the title of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire , and lends a curiously apocalyptic meaning to Game of Thrones . Will the world end in fire or ice?

This idea of one world coming to an end and another, potentially, being born, is obviously also an important context for Robert Frost’s poem: the idea of an old world order giving way to a new was ‘in the air’ when he wrote the poem.

About Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874-1963) is regarded as one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century. And yet he didn’t belong to any particular movement: unlike his contemporaries William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens he was not a modernist, preferring more traditional modes and utilising a more direct and less obscure poetic language.

Many of his poems are about the natural world, with woods and trees featuring prominently in some of his most famous and widely anthologised poems (‘The Road Not Taken’, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘Birches’, ‘Tree at My Window’). Elsewhere, he was fond of very short and pithy poetic statements: see ‘Fire and Ice’ and ‘But Outer Space’, for example.

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It is interesting that Eliot wrote his apocalyptic poem five years after with his own spin. Did Frost influence his version?

That’s a good question. It’s difficult to say what Eliot thought of Frost, and how familiar he was with his work, although it is certainly curious that, in the midst of the next war, in ‘Little Gidding’ (1942), Eliot gives us the line ‘This is the death of water and fire.’

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Robert Frost’s ‘Out, Out—’

Analysis of Robert Frost’s ‘Out, Out—’

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on February 22, 2021 • ( 0 )

‘Out, Out—’ (1916)

“ ‘Out, Out—’ ” is one of Frost’s most dramatic and celebrated poems. It was written in memorial to a neighborhood boy Frost knew when he was living in Franconia, New Hampshire. Raymond Tracy Fitzgerald, a 16-year-old twin, lived on the South Road outside of Bethlehem. An article about his sudden death appeared in the Littleton Courier on March 31, 1910. Frost knew the boy well; Frost’s children and Fitzgerald had played together. Fitzgerald lost his life from shock and heart failure on March 24, 1910, within moments of having his hand lacerated by a buzz saw (Thompson, 566–567).

The “ ‘Out, Out—’ ” of the title is a reference to Act 5, scene 5, of Shakespeare’s Macbeth : “Out, out, brief candle! / Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more: it is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” Robert Pack holds that Frost’s “ ‘Out, Out—’ ” “is a confrontation with such nothingness” and that the “meaninglessness of death is anticipated early in the poem with the image of dust” (158).

The young boy is assisting in the sawing of wood in his backyard. He is a “big boy / Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart.” The buzz saw is depicted as animate and malevolent from the start. It is described as snarling and rattling in the yard, seemingly out of control, as if on the lookout for something to tear into. The wood the boy is cutting, in contrast, is referred to as “[s]weet scented stuff,” calling to mind the child’s youth and innocence in contrast to the work he is doing. The brutality of the saw and how quickly it can cut through wood or flesh also is acknowledged. The scene is seductively picturesque. It is dusk, and five Vermont mountain ranges are visible “[u]nder the sunset.” The scene has a rustic serenity that the saw’s buzzing, snarling, and rattling interrupt.

the smoke of an extinguished candle on black background.

The speaker explains how the saw snarled and rattled, yet “nothing happened: day was all but done.” In other words, the saw had been doing its job without causing any harm until now. He wishes they had simply “call[ed] it a day,” because by doing so the incident might have been avoided. It was all in the timing. There is a sense that the slightest change in the day’s events would have changed everything. If only the boy had been given a half an hour at rest or at play instead, Frost speculates in hindsight.

The boy’s sister comes to call the workers for supper and “At the word, the saw, / As if to prove saws knew what supper meant, / Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap— / He must have given the hand.” The description of the accident is startling. It is presented as a chain effect. The girl announces “Supper,” and her simple utterance begins the chain reaction. The poem treats her as the beginning, if not the cause. She has called the boy for dinner and has somehow met the time frame of the saw, perhaps by drawing the boy’s attention away. The responsibility is not hers, but her role makes clear the pain she would feel about her involvement. The animated saw is seen to respond to her utterance, rather than, as might be supposed, her call causing the boy to avert his eyes from his task to look up, thereby losing control of the saw. It is suggested that the saw actually leapt, as though it was waiting, anticipating the moment when it could do so. Its actions appear premeditated. But then Frost writes that the boy must have “given” the hand, returning to reality, to the sudden recognition that the chain of events he has described is inaccurate. His conclusion is an acceptance that neither hand nor saw “refused the meeting.” There is a macabre element to this insight, as though hand and saw somehow sought each other out.

“The boy’s first outcry [is] a rueful laugh,” as though he recognizes the severity of what has happened and can somehow anticipate his death. The boy laughs because he is caught by surprise—what has happened is not yet real. He is in shock, thinking his hand remains intact when it has already been terribly lacerated. He holds it up to keep the “life” and blood “from spilling” but also in “appeal,” in the hope that something can be done, that something can be undone. The boy “saw all spoiled,” as if he saw his brief life passing by in an instant. Robert Faggen notes that the “boy loses his hand, one crucial part of human anatomy that distinguishes this species from all others and represents the variant that enabled the creation, production, and use of tools. Ironically, it is cut off by the form, the tool that it created. The tool that it created becomes, ironically, a weapon against its creator” (153).

The doctor comes and places the boy “in the dark of ether.” But he is only with the boy a moment before the boy is gone as quickly as his hand. “No one believed” that he had died any more than the boy had believed his hand was lost. They listen, the snarling and rattling of the buzz saw silenced; the scene is without sound, except for the boy’s faint pulse. “Little—less—nothing!” is the pronouncement, and “that end[s] it.”

The scene, the boy’s life, are ended. “No more to build on there,” the speaker, detached, resolves coolly; “And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” The ending phrase echoes sentiments about death from the wife at the end of “Home Burial”:

One is alone, and he dies more alone. Friends make pretense of following to the grave, But before one is in it, their minds are turned And making the best of their way back to life And living people, and things they understand.

Both poems concern the death of boys, though of different ages and by different means. Jay Parini writes that “However heartless these lines have sounded to some ears, Frost is making a point about a way of dealing with grief; by plunging back into the affairs of life, which demand attention (especially in the context of a poor farm at the turn of the century), the grieving family is able to work through their grief.” Parini also notes that when Frost and his wife Elinor lost their young son Elliott to cholera, they “could not simply stop in their tracks.” They had a 14-month-old daughter, Lesley, and chickens that needed tending, among other demands (70).

Still, the phrasing comes off as cold and factual, like a newspaper report. But when faced with such loss of a person, with such brutality in nature, how can people be expected to respond? Robert Pack holds that the speaker is “outside the story he is telling” but “wishes to enter into the scene as one of the characters as if he might be of some help” (158). This is clear from the speaker’s efforts in the beginning of the poem to turn back time, to call it a day, to undo before it is done. Faggen also finds that “the poem is rather stoic in its ultimate tone of acceptance of the way individual lives become sacrificed unexpectedly in a general machinery. Here the machinery, a buzz saw, takes on a life of its own and destroys the hand that created it” (152). The recognition of the randomness of life, of vulnerability in the face of meaningless acts, ends the poem abruptly. But the poem also might be said to end in bitterness and frustration rather than cool detachment. After all, the speaker is not among those who have “turned to their affairs” but is still trying to build on what is “no more.”

The poem was first published in July 1916 in McClure’s ; it was later collected in Mountain Interval.

FURTHER READING Bruels, Marcia F. “Frost’s ‘Out, Out—,’ ” Explicator 55, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 85–88. Cramer, Jeffrey S. Robert Frost among His Poems: A Literary Companion to the Poet’s Own Biographical Contexts and Associations. Jefferson, N.C.: MacFarland, 1996. Faggen, Robert. Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, 152–153. Hoffman, Tyler. Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry. Hanover, N.H.: Middlebury College Press, 2001. Locklear, Gloriana. “Frost’s ‘Out, Out—,’ ” Explicator 49, no. 3 (Spring 1991): 167–169. Pack, Robert. Belief and Uncertainty in the Poetry of Robert Frost. Hanover, N.H.: Middlebury College Press, 2003. Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York: Holt, 1999. Sears, John F. “The Subversive Performer in Frost’s ‘Snow’ and ‘Out, Out—,’ ” In The Motive for Metaphor: Essays on Modern Poetry, edited by Francis C. Blessington and Guy L. Rotella, 82–92. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983. Thompson, Lawrance. Robert Frost: The Early Years. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966.

“Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost: Devastating Struggle of Human Emotions Essay

Fire and Ice (1920) is one of Robert Frost’s best-known poems. It metaphorically represents relationships between people, the struggle between the two extremums of human emotions, and its ability to bring the end of the world. The poem meticulously combines formal conciseness and conceptual depth. Thus, Fire and Ice is a remarkable example of the author’s skill to render a profound meaning using a minimum amount of linguistic tools.

The poem is composed of a nine-line stanza with irregular meter and rhyme pattern. The first two lines immediately establish a conflict between fire and ice as two extreme poles of the author’s worldview. Each of these elements is capable of bringing the world to an end: “Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice” (Frost 197). The narrator emphasizes the fundamental opposition between fire and ice through the use of anaphora, that is, the repetition of the phrase “Some say” at the beginning of each of two lines (Frost 197). This conceptual juxtaposition imposes the tone for the rest of the poem and has a decisive role in its metric framework.

In lines 3 and 4, the narrator compares fire to a human passion towards someone or something. The author suggests that one’s strong desires can have a destructive capacity. However, the speaker further introduces another powerful agent. In the last three lines, ice represents human hatred and cruelty. Indeed, cold reasoning also may be a disruptive force with similarly devastating outcomes for the world. Hence, the poem relies on the stylistic device of personification, which implies the endowment of inanimate objects with human traits. In such a way, Fire and Ice provides a vivid and compelling representation of abstract notions.

It is also necessary to observe that the poem’s tone is seemingly casual and relaxed. However, it discusses the serious and fundamental issues of human relationships and world order. This intention is evident in lines 5 and 6: “But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate” (Frost 197). The narrator hints that the world’s demise is inevitable, that he is ready to face it more than once. The speaker also declares that he has already experienced the ugly side of human nature. In such a manner, the poem ensures a more profound effect on its audience. The author deliberately applies a careless tone to attract the reader’s attention to this discrepancy between the form and the content.

Furthermore, the line breaks in Fire and Ice are not accidental and convey a deep meaning. As one can easily observe, the break between the first two lines demonstrates the irreconcilable antagonism between fire and ice. Indeed, these two forces cannot exist within a single space, eventually breaking the poem into pieces. This graphic rupture symbolizes the world’s breakdown as a result of the devastating struggle of human emotions.

The line breaks are also significant for the poem’s conclusion. The last two lines are the shortest ones, consisting only of three words each. This splintered architecture provides the extreme conciseness of the poem’s ending and demonstrates the speaker’s pessimistic prognosis. In other words, the last lines symbolically depict the end of the world, where everything perishes in the struggle of human ambition and hatred.

Thus, Robert Frost’s poem vividly represents human relationships and their destructive potential. The central images of fire and ice symbolize the powerful emotions of passion and hate, and the speaker emphasizes that both of them are equally dangerous and disruptive for the world around us. The narrator admonishes thoughtless obedience to one’s inherent ambitions and aspirations, since it may have tragic consequences for humanity. The formal elements in Fire and Ice effectively contribute to rendering the profound and symbolic meaning of the poem. Hence, the surface means effectively working in tandem with its thoughtful content and ensuring the author’s strong message to the audience.

Frost, Robert. The Collected Poems of Robert Frost. Chartwell Books, 2016.

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IvyPanda. (2022, February 12). "Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost: Devastating Struggle of Human Emotions. https://ivypanda.com/essays/fire-and-ice-by-robert-frost-devastating-struggle-of-human-emotions/

""Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost: Devastating Struggle of Human Emotions." IvyPanda , 12 Feb. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/fire-and-ice-by-robert-frost-devastating-struggle-of-human-emotions/.

IvyPanda . (2022) '"Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost: Devastating Struggle of Human Emotions'. 12 February.

IvyPanda . 2022. ""Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost: Devastating Struggle of Human Emotions." February 12, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/fire-and-ice-by-robert-frost-devastating-struggle-of-human-emotions/.

1. IvyPanda . ""Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost: Devastating Struggle of Human Emotions." February 12, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/fire-and-ice-by-robert-frost-devastating-struggle-of-human-emotions/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . ""Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost: Devastating Struggle of Human Emotions." February 12, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/fire-and-ice-by-robert-frost-devastating-struggle-of-human-emotions/.

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A Summary and Analysis of Robert Frost’s ‘Fire and Ice’

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Analysis of Robert Frost’s ‘Out, Out—’

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“Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost: Devastating Struggle of Human Emotions Essay