National Poetry Month Poem of the Day: "Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost

Poetic form and structure often enhance a poem's theme or meaning. Frost's ironic use of meter and rhythm in "Fire and Ice" underlies his hidden theme that moderation is the world's salvation. Frost uses two extremes, fire and ice, as the poem's controlling images, images which symbolize the two extremes of lust and hate. These two extremes, he expostulates, will eventually destroy the world. The rhythm and meter of the poem and the use of meiosis offer an alternative to extremism--moderation--and provides a solution to the world's impending doom. Frost chooses the fast-flowing, less serious iambic tetrameter mixed with iambic duometer over the more serious, slower-moving iambic pentameter as a framework for his understated theme of the world's destruction and potential salvation, a meter that brings to the forefront his use of meiosis: he casually states "I hold with those who favor fire" (4), and "for destruction ice / Is also great / and would suffice" (7-9) to comment on cataclysmic events. Although his poetic form contrasts the overt theme of the poem, it underscores its underlying meaning.

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