CBSE ENGLISH LANGUAGE & LITERATURE

Detailed explanation-1: -The poem “Fire and Ice ” by Robert Frost is a metaphor for human perceptions of desires and hatred. The fire symbolises burning desires, while the ice, on the other hand, describes ice-cold hatred. It describes how we humans will be the end of our own race.

Detailed explanation-2: -A. According to Frost, ‘fire’ stands for greed, conflict, fury, cruelty, lust and avarice whereas ‘Ice’ stands for insensitivity, coldness, intolerance, indifference, rigidity and hatred.

Detailed explanation-3: -According to the poet, fire represents human desires and ice represents the hatred among humans. Desires are fiery like fire and can cause destruction by burning. Ice is on the opposite end of the spectrum to fire and is cold.

Detailed explanation-4: -In most of his poems, Frost draws on the phenomena and objects of nature which become symbols of universal issues, ideas and feelings. Thus the natural scene of a bifurcating path in wood evokes the contemplation of the universal problem of choice (The Road not Taken).

Detailed explanation-5: -Fire and Ice is a short rhyming poem Frost wrote in 1920 that was probably inspired by Dante’s Inferno, Canto 32 (the first book of his 14th century Divine Comedy) which deals with the subject of sinners in a fiery hell, up to their necks in a lake of ice.