inferno

Fire and Ice in Dante's Inferno

    The more we read of Frost the more we grow in awe of him, his intellect, his thinking, and his understanding. For Frost, poetry and life were one and the same. In an interview he said, 'One thing I care about, and wish young people could care about, is taking poetry as the first form of understanding.' Each Robert Frost poem strikes a chord somewhere, each poem bringing us closer to life with the compression of feeling and emotion into so few words. This essay will focus on one particular poem, the meaning of which has been much debated due to the amount of words used, or the lack there-of.
      There have been many readers of Frost�s poem �Fire and Ice�, thus being interpreted in many ways. Many readers would interpret the poem to mean something about �the physical end of the world, or the end of the physical world� (1). Lawrence Thompson views the poem as hinting at the destructive powers in "the heat of love or passion and the cold of hate," sensing that "these two extremes are made so to encompass life as to be a gathering up of all that may exist between them; all that may be swept away by them" (2).
      Upon closer examination of �Fire and Ice�, I found a distinct parallel that closely mirrors the tale of Dante�s Inferno. The Inferno is the first part of Dante Alighieri's poem, the Divine Comedy, which chronicles Dante's journey to God, and is made up of The Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise). In The Inferno, Dante begins his journey on the surface of the Earth, guided by the Roman epic poet Virgil, and spirals his way downward through the nine rings of Hell.
      On a fundamental level the nine lines in �Fire and Ice� reflect a similarity to the nine rings of The Inferno, although Frost's poem does not consistently spiral downward, as does The Inferno. Dante�s vision of Hell was cone shaped, made up of increasingly tight circles. Fire was used occasionally in tormenting the sinners throughout Dante�s travel into Inferno, until the ninth ring was reached. Upon entering the ninth ring, a comparatively blameless giant helped Dante and Virgil into the pit. Torrents of wind had a group of sinners, giants, frozen into a solid lake of ice. A three headed demon, Lucifer, at the center of the lake, was causing the sinners, and himself, to be frozen in place for eternity by the frenzied beating of his wings.
      The understated opening two lines in Frost�s poem, "Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice," at first seem merely to suggest the biblical and scientific predictions about the end of the world: an apocalyptic holocaust or a new ice age. However, as figurative representations of desire and hatred, fire and ice embody the very system of Aristotelian ethics Dante employs in arranging The Inferno: Sins of reason are worse than sins of passion. Frost associates fire with the senses and places in the first lines or, so to speak, near the top of his poem as the lesser of the two types of sin: "From what I've tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire." The verbs are sensuous and although not direct allusions, they recall characters in Dante's upper hell such as the glutton Ciacco the Hog ("tasted"), the adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca ("hold"), and the hoarders ("favor").
     Another important similarity to be noticed about Frost�s poem is the metric pattern used throughout. As does Dante in The Inferno, Frost employs a modified version of a terza rima in �Fire and Ice� (a poetic meter in an ABA ABC BCB pattern). Also by using an iambic tetrameter (four stresses) in the first line, 'Some say the world will end in fire,' representing the outer rings of The Inferno. The next line gives a the chilling contrast, cutting the meter in half to an iambic dimeter (two stresses),'Some say in ice,' ending with the sound of the wind caused by Lucifer's desperate struggle for freedom.
For the next five lines Frost reverts to using the iambic tetrameter, leading us to the finale of the poem. Moreover, he sustains from using the cold sound of 'ice', until three lines after the two lined thesis in �twice�, leading us through the lesser rings of The Inferno spiraling downward.
     From the third line of the poem to the seventh, Frost makes a slow transition from of the fate of fire, to that of ice:
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice...
The increasing coolness of the words, too, adds to the kinesthetic chill in the end, when Frost uses the words 'twice', 'ice', and 'suffice'. Each of the words are signified as the high stress point of each line, giving a final thrust in the last two lines of the poem saying that for the destruction of the world 'ice...would suffice.'

     Finally, in addition to the internal evidence in the poem, there is circumstantial evidence to suggest Frost's familiarity with Dante's Inferno. Frost's personal library, now housed at the Fales Library of New York University, contains four editions of Dante's Divine Comedy. Although the Fletcher translation of 1931 is too late to have been an influence (the poem first appeared in Harper's in December 1920), the other three translations - two poetic forms by Longfellow, originally published in 1865, and a prose translation by Charles Eliot Norton in 1892, which relied heavily on Longfellow's popular verse translation (5) - could clearly have had an impact.
     Both Longfellow and Norton use the same words "heat" and "frost" to describe the unexpected antithesis of punishment awaiting the damned below: "'I come to lead you to the other shore, / To the eternal shades in heat and frost'" (Longfellow 3.86-87). Much later, and in what I think is 'a veiled tribute to Robert Frost', John Ciardi translates these lines as(2):
I come to lead you to the other shore,
into eternal dark, into fire and ice. (3.83-84)

                                                                              Works Cited:

(1) http://www.epcc.edu/Faculty/joeo/fire_scientific.htm. Online. Netscape Navigator. Feb. 4, 2001.
(2) Thompson, Lawrance. Fire and Ice: The Art and Thought of Robert Frost. New York: Henry Holt, 1942.
(3) Dante Alighieri. The Inferno. Trans John Ciardi. New York: Mentor, 1954.
(4) Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Vols. 9-11. Trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
(5) http://www.divinecomedy.org. Online. Netscape Navigator. Feb. 5, 2001.