Fire and Ice (Poem)

Fire and Ice (Poem) | Question and Answers |
NCERT| Class 10 | English | First Flight

Thinking about the (Page 15)

Question 1. There are many ideas about how the world will ‘end’. Do you think the world will end some day? Have you ever thought what would happen if the sun got so hot that it ‘burst’, or grew colder and colder?

Answer 1  I do believe that the world will end some day but nobody knows when. If the Sun got so hot that it burst, the whole of the Earth would perish immediately. If the Sun grew colder and colder, everything will come to an end as without sunlight, life will end.

Question 2. For Frost, what do ‘fire’ and ‘ice’ stand for? Here are some ideas:

greed	avarice	cruelty	lust
conflict	fury	intolerance	rigidity
insensitivity	coldness	indifference	hatred

Answer 2 Fire’ stands for greed, avarice, lust, conflict and fury. ‘Ice’ stands for cruelty, intolerance, rigidity, insensitivity, coldness, indifference and hatred.

Question 3. What is the rhyme scheme of the poem? How does it help in bringing out the contrasting ideas in the poem?

Answer 3 The rhyme scheme of the poem is- a b a a b c b c b

The contrasting ideas of ‘fire’ and ‘ice’ are presented using this scheme.He mentions that both fire and ice are probable ends of this world. Fire represents desire and can therefore be a cause of the end of the world. He also mentioned ice in between to symbolise that the coldness and indifference towards one another will be enough to end the world.In the second stanza, he says that he knows of enough hate in the world to be sure that even destruction through ice  would be sufficient to bring about the end of the world.