National Poetry Month: Got Frost?

A recognisable poet this time - Robert Frost, who is really one of my favourites. Mostly because he is accessible to even one as illiterate as me, but then again, accessiblilty is talent and vice versa; nothing so pretentious as deliberate indecipherability, I always say. (e.g.: lyrics to "American Pie".)

Fire and Ice

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 know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

There's Frost's greatest strength, IMHO: copius subtlety. There is no thundering rhythm, no mounting spirals of alliteration, no clauses snaking and breaking across multiple lines; the rhymes are simple and clean. And the rhyme schemes are almost always more complicated than they first seem. I read "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" many times and never noticed -- until someone pointed it out to me -- that the rhyme scheme is not aaxa bbxb but aaba bbcb ccdc. I read "Design" a bunch of times before I realized it was a sonnet. Because, really, who writes sonnets about moths and spiders and weeds?

Here there're just nine lines, two of the rhymes are taken up with repetitions of "fire" and "ice", no word fancier than "suffice" (or "perish", depending on which of those is fancier), and the only word longer than two syllables is "destruction". It's so... innocuous and quietly effective.

It wasn't until some criticism here (see John Serio) pointed out these things that I became aware that the nine lines of the poem (may) represent the nine circles of Dante's hell, and that the poem, like Dante's hell, has a funnel/narrowing towards the bottom structure.

The page linked above recounts an anecdote (possibly apocryphal) where Frost asked a scientist at a party "How will the world end?" - and the two possibilities in this poem are actually pretty scientifically sound. Which is not the point, agreed, but a very nice touch nevertheless.

The thing I like best, though, about this poem is the mild acceptance quality of the throwaway lines like "if it had to perish twice" and "for destruction ice/Is also great/And would suffice" - the completely unquestioned,stated as perfectly natural, supposition that there is enough destructive human emotion in the world to annihilate it twice over, and the only question is, which will get there first. I mean, it's such a darkly cynical, black humour sort of view, but so comfortably stated!



Questions? Observations? Leave your smart, biting queries in the comments, and I'll get 'em on Ask Me Anything Day!

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• writing