Poetry Pairing | 'Fire and Ice' - NYTimes.com

This week?s Poetry Pairing matches Robert Frost?s classic poem ?Fire and Ice? with an Opinion piece by James Atlas that, in addition to quoting Frost?s poem (and T.S. Eliot as well), states that ?whether in 50 or 100 or 200 years, there?s a good chance that New York City will sink beneath the sea.? The piece is called ?Is This the End??

After reading the poem and Opinion piece, tell us what you think ? or suggest other Times content that could be matched with the poem instead.

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Poem

?Fire and Ice? was included in Robert Frost?s collection ?New Hampshire,? for which he won his first Pulitzer Prize. It is one of his most cited poems.

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.

Times Selection Excerpt

In the Opinion piece ?Is This the End?,? James Atlas writes:

Humans are ingenious. Our species tends to see nature as something of a nuisance, a phenomenon to be outwitted. Consider efforts to save Venice: planners have hatched one scheme after another to prevent the city from sinking. Industrial development has been curtailed. Buildings dating from the Renaissance have been ?relocated.?

The most ambitious project, begun a decade ago, is the installation of mobile gates in the lagoons. Known by the acronym MOSE ? the Italian name for Moses, who mythically parted the Red Sea ? it?s an intricate engineering feat: whenever the tide rises, metal barriers that lie in concrete bunkers on the sea floor are lifted by compressed air pressure and pivoted into place on hinges.

Is the Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico ? the project?s official name ? some engineer?s fantasy? It was scheduled for completion this year, but that has been put off until 2014. Even if, by some miracle, the gates materialize, they will be only a stay against the inevitable. Look at the unfortunate Easter Islanders, who left behind as evidence of their existence a mountainside of huge blank-faced busts, or the Polynesians of Pitcairn Island, who didn?t leave behind much more than a few burial sites and a bunch of stone tools. Every civilization must go.

Yet each goes in its own way. In ?Collapse,? Jared Diamond showed how the disappearance of a civilization has multiple causes. A cascade of events with unforeseen consequences invariably brings it to a close. The Norse of Greenland cut down their trees (for firewood and other purposes) until there were no more trees, which made it a challenge to build houses or boats. There were other causes, too: violent clashes with the Inuit, bad weather, ice pileups in the fjords blocking trade routes. But deforestation was the prime factor. By the end, no tree fell in the forest, as there was none; and there would have been no one to hear it if it had.

? ?Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice,? declared Robert Frost. Another alternative would be lava. Pliny the Younger?s letters to Tacitus described the eruption of Mount Vesuvius: A plume of dirt and ash rose in the sky; rocks pelted Pompeii; and then darkness arrived. ?It was not like a moonless or cloudy night, but like being in an enclosed place where the light has been doused.? Who did this? It must have been the gods. ?Many were raising their hands to implore the gods, but more took the view that no gods now existed anywhere, and that this was an eternal and final darkness hanging over the world.? But of course it wasn?t the end of the world: it was just the end of them.

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See more about the collaboration and find ideas for using any week?s pairing for teaching and learning.

The Poetry Foundation has an extensive biography of Robert Frost.

Source: http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/poetry-pairing-fire-and-ice/

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