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Fire and Ice – Analysis
Despite its light and conversational tone, “Fire and Ice” is a bleak poem that highlights human beings’ talent for self-destruction. The poem is a work of eschatology—writing about the end of the world—and poses two possible causes for this end: fire and ice. The speaker uses these natural elements as symbols for desire and hatred, respectively, arguing that both emotions left unchecked have the capacity to destroy civilization itself.
The speaker begins by relating that, when it comes to how the world will end, “some” people favor fire and “some” ice. At this early stage of the poem, these two elements could easily relate to a natural disaster. For example, a potential world-ending “fire” could be something like the asteroid that most likely destroyed the dinosaurs; and ice could relate to a future ice age, or the extinguishment of the sun. But as soon as those more naturalistic ends to the world are suggested, the poem changes direction and makes it clear that fire and ice are symbols—not of natural disasters, but of humanity’s ability to create disasters of its own.
By “fire” the speaker actually means “desire”—and from the speaker’s limited personal experience, the speaker knows desire to be a powerfully destructive force. Humanity, then, could bring about the end of the world through passion, anger, violence, greed, and bloodlust. Indeed, the “fire” now seems like an image of warfare too. (Indeed, the poem was written shortly after then end of World War I.)
Though the speaker feels “fire” is the likely way for humanity to destroy itself and the world, the speaker also feels that human beings’ capacity for destruction is so great that it could bring about this destruction more than once. (This is tongue-in-cheek, of course, as once would certainly be enough.) Here, the speaker presents “ice” as another method for ending it all, aligning it with hatred.
Ice works differently from fire in this eschatological prediction. Human destruction doesn’t have to be bright, noisy, and violent—hate can spread in more subtle ways. Ice has connotations of coldness and indifference, and so a possible reading here is that the end of the world could be brought about by inaction rather than some singular major event. A contemporary reading could map climate change onto “ice” here: if people fail to act over humanity’s effect on the climate, it will gradually, but assuredly, bring about destruction.
By the poem’s end, though, the choice between “ice” and “fire” starts to seem a little false—particularly as the speaker’s tone is so casual and even glib (“ice is also great”). Ice and fire, though utterly different in the literal sense, here represent one and the same thing: the destructive potential of humanity. Either method will suffice to bring about the inevitable end of the world. In just nine short lines, then, “Fire and Ice” offers a powerful warning about human nature. Finally, it’s important to notice something that isn’t in the poem: any hint of a possibility that humanity won’t end the world.
Anaphora – is used in the first two lines, helping to establish the poem’s antithesis between fire and ice. Essentially, the anaphora is used to set dividing lines between two different types of people. On the one hand, there are those who believe that the world will end in fire; on the other hand, some people believe it will end in ice. Whereas anaphora is often used to build a sense of rhetorical power (e.g., in Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech), here it’s used to underplay the seriousness of the subject (which is nothing less than the annihilation of all humanity!). This is because what the anaphora actually repeats—”Some say”—is distinctly conversational in tone, even perhaps a little gossipy. There is very little sense of panic or anxiety.
But, digging a little deeper, the anaphora is actually representative of both fire and ice. The anaphora is a linguistic act of division; fire and ice represent acts of division too. Whether it’s by fire or ice, the world will end because of a collective failure of humanity—the inability of people to see themselves in others in service of an us vs. them mentality. Subtly, then, the anaphora hints at these coming divisions.
