一首简洁，巧妙，令人们深解不已的诗 - Fire and Ice （by Robert Frost）
Fire and Ice
By Robert Frost
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 say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Fire and Ice (poem)
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A star exploding , one way in which the world would end in fire.
"Fire and Ice" is one of Robert Frost 's most popular poems, published in December 1920 in Harper's Magazine [1] and in 1923 in his Pulitzer prize winning book New Hampshire (see 1920 in poetry , 1923 in poetry ). It discusses the end of the world , likening the elemental force of fire with the emotion of desire, and ice with hate .
Contents |
Poem
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.
Inspiration
"Fire and Ice" was inspired by a passage in Canto 32 of Dante's Inferno , in which the worst offenders of hell, the traitors, are submerged, while in a fiery hell, up to their necks in ice: "a lake so bound with ice, / It did not took like water, but like a glass ... right clear / I saw, where sinners are preserved in ice." [2]
In an anecdote he recounted in 1960 in a "Science and the Arts" presentation, prominent astronomer Harlow Shapley claims to have inspired "Fire and Ice". [3] Shapley describes an encounter he had with Robert Frost a year before the poem was published in which Frost, noting that Shapley was the astronomer of his day, asks him how the world will end. [3] Shapley's response is that either the sun will explode and incinerate the Earth, or the Earth will somehow escape this fate only to end up slowly freezing in deep space. [3] Shapley then describes his surprise at seeing "Fire and Ice", which seems to ponder the question of which of these two outcomes will occur, published a year later, and cites it as an example of how science can influence the creation of art, or clarify its meaning. [3] Although the poem does seem to pose a scientific question of how the world may end, most critics agree that this serves to mask the darker meaning of the poem, that flaws of the human heart are capable of leading to the destruction of the world at any time. [3]
Style and structure
It is written in a single 9-line stanza , which greatly narrows in the last two lines. The poem's meter is an irregular mix of iambic tetrameter and dimeter , and the rhyme scheme (which is ABAABCBCB) also follows no regular pattern.
Critiques
Marveled at for its compactness "Fire and Ice" signaled for Frost "a new style, tone, manner, [and] form". [3] Its casual tone masks the serious question it poses to the reader. [3]
Compression of Dante's Inferno:
In his critique of "Fire and Ice", John N. Serio asserts the poem is a compression of Dante's Inferno. [3] He draws a parallel between the nine lines of the poem with the nine rings of Hell, and further notes that like the downward funnel of the rings of Hell, the poem narrows considerably in the last two lines. [3] Additionally, the rhyme scheme , ABA-ABC-BCB, he remarks, is similar to the one Dante invented for Inferno. [3]
In Inferno Dante posits, influenced by Aristotle's ethical system, that sins committed from reason are far worse than sins committed from desire, due to reason being God's greatest gift, thus its perversion the worst sin of all. [3] With this reasoning, the sinners who commit sins of reason are forced into the lower, worse rings of Hell. [3] Similarly, the discussion of hatred, a sin of reason, is placed lower in the poem's nine lines than that of desire, a sin of the passion.
Frost's diction further highlights the parallels between Frost's discussion of desire and hate with Dante's outlook on sins of passion and reason with sensuous and physical verbs describing desire and loosely recalling the characters Dante met in the upper rings of Hell: "taste" (recalling the Glutton), "hold" (recalling the adulterous lovers), and "favor" (recalling the hoarders). [3] In contrast, hate is discussed with verbs of reason and thought ("I think I know.../To know..."). 
Frost's diction also notes that people who commit sins of desire are more common than people who commit sins of hate as it uses the pronoun "those" to describe people who commit sins of desire, suggesting plurality, and that the speaker himself has "tasted" it before, where as with his discussion of hatred there's no mention of his having experienced it, leaving the reader to ponder whether his knowledge of hatred comes mostly from contemplation("I think I know") and not from experience. Moreover just as the upper rings of Hell are larger to fit more people in them, the lines, functioning as the rings of Hell, that describe desire are longer than those that describe hate, further suggesting that more people commit sins of passion than hate.
References
- ^ Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice" , in the article "A Group of Poems" by Robert Frost, Harper's Magazine , Vol. 142, No. 847, December 1920, p. 67.
- ^ Meyers, Jeffrey, Robert Frost: A Biography, Publisher (1996)
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m "On "Fire and Ice"" . Modern American Poetry. Oxford University Press. 2000. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/fireice.htm . Retrieved April 11, 2010.
Further reading
- Meyers, Jeffrey, Robert Frost: A Biography, Publisher (1996)
External links
- Critiques on "Fire and Ice" , Robert Frost, Modern American Poetry.
( 来源: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_and_Ice_(poem))
那天一好友带给我这首诗和以上的wikipediad的简介和Amazon的study guide (http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides5/FireandIce.html），我们都觉得这首诗很简单，可是读了wikipediad的简介和Amazon的study guide，还有很多人的评论（http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/fire-and-ice/），特别是知道了Dante's Inferno（见上解释和图）之后才能理解诗的意境和诗人的用心等。
