16. Fire and Ice / New Hampshire(1923) - Robert Frost

[esse]

16. Fire and Ice

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.

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불과 얼음

어떤 이는 세상이 불로 끝난다 하고,

어떤 이는 얼음으로 끝난다고 한다.

내가 욕망을 맛본 바로는

나는 불을 지지하는 사람들 편이다.

그러나 세상이 두 번 멸망한다면,

증오도 충분히 안다는 생각에

얼음 또한 그 파괴력이

엄청나고 충분하다고

말할 수 있다.

-신재실 옮김-

단상(斷想): 지구는 멸망할 것인가? 무엇 때문에 멸망할 것인가? 불가피하고 엄청난 문제지만, 감상에 휘둘려서는 안 된다. 세상이 불로 망하리라는 사람도 있고, 얼음으로 망하리라는 사람도 있다. 둘 중에 하나라면, 어느 쪽일까?

시인은 경험으로 안다. 시인 자신이 가졌던 불타는 욕망을 생각하건대, 불로 망할 것 같다. 하지만 다시 생각하면, 증오의 파괴력 또한 세상을 침몰시킬 만큼 위력이 있다. 그렇다. 역사를 돌이켜 보면, 인간의 생존은 욕망과 증오의 지배를 받아오지 않았는가? 욕망은 불이고 증오는 얼음이다.

우리는 결국 불에 타서 재가 되거나 얼음에 얼어서 미라가 되고 말 것이다. 하지만 시인은 흥분하지 않는다. “어떤 이는 세상이 불로 끝난다 하고,/ 어떤 이는 얼음으로 끝난다고 한다.”대립되는 두 가지 설을 담담한 어조로 제시한다. “욕망을 맛본 바로는”이라는 말로 시인은 자신이 가졌던 불타는 욕망의 달콤한 “맛”과 불쾌한 충격을 암시한다. 아담과 이브가 바로 달콤한 욕망의 덫에 걸려 에덴의 종말을 맞지 않았는가?

에덴에 이어 지구의 종말도 가까운가? 지구 또한 욕망으로 멸망할 것인가? 시인의 경험으로는 “욕망”과 “증오”의 파괴력은 막상막하다.“두 번 멸망한다면”이번에는 “증오”로 멸망할 차례다. “얼음 또한 그 파괴력이/ 엄청나고 충분하다고/ 말할 수 있다.”얼음의 파괴력이 그저“충분하다”고 낮추어 말함으로써, 인간의 생존에서 증오의 파괴력이 더욱 가공스럽다는 시인의 경험을 강조한다. 아마도 인간 세계는 증오로 멸망할 것이다.

-신재실 씀-

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John N. Serio: On "Fire and Ice

"Most readers of Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice" agree with Lawrance Thompson's view that the poem is a marvel of compactness, signaling for Frost "a new style, tone, manner, [and] form" (Years of Triumph 152). Thompson interprets "Fire and Ice" as hinting at the destructive powers of "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" (Fire and Ice 122). But a closer look at the poem reveals that in structure, style, and theme "Fire and Ice" is a brilliant, gemlike compression of Dante's Inferno.(1) As such, it presents a much more profound distinction between the two extremes of love and hate. Like Dante, Frost follows Aristotle in condemning hatred as far worse than desire.

At its most obvious, formal level, "Fire and Ice" has nine lines, mirroring Dante's nine circles of hell. Although Frost's poem is not exactly funnel shaped like Dante's hell, it does narrow considerably at the end as Frost literally cuts in half his general pattern of four stresses (iambic tetrameter) to close on two lines having only two stresses each (iambic dimeter). Interestingly, the one line near the opening or top of the poem that contains two stresses, "Some say in ice," evokes the frozen punishment awaiting the worst sinners at the constricted bottom of Dante's hell. In addition, and surprisingly overlooked by most readers, Frost employs a modified terza rima, the rhyme scheme Dante invented for his Divine Comedy: aba, abc, bcb.

But it is at the thematic level that Frost most tellingly follows Dante, for the poem reflects the same system of ethics that Dante employs to classify the sins and punishments of hell. In reading the Inferno, readers are often puzzled by Dante's arrangement, because flatterers, fortunetellers, hypocrites, thieves, even counterfeiters are placed below murderers. The explanation that Dante provides in canto 11 derives from Aristotle: Sins of reason are worse than sins of passion. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle observes that what distinguishes human beings from other life forms is reason; therefore, human beings must function with reason in order to fulfill their maximum potential, what Aristotle terms arete - excellence or virtue (17). As a Catholic, Dante modifies this principle by adding that reason is God's greatest gift to humankind and, therefore, its perversion or misuse constitutes the worst possible sin: "But since fraud / Is the vice of which man alone is capable, / God loathes it most" (Ciardi 11.24-26).

All the damned know they have committed sin, but those in the upper circles such as the carnal, the gluttons, the hoarders and wasters, the angry and sullen (note the Aristotelian lack of moderation in these categories) let passion sway their reason. Those in middle hell such as the murderers, warmongers, suicides, and homosexuals exercise emotion in alignment with reason: Violent though some of their actions may be, these sinners do what they think. But those in lower hell - the flatterers, hypocrites, thieves, and those who have betrayed family and country - exercise deceit. They use their reason to camouflage their true intent and thus pervert the proper use, according to Dante, of God's most distinctive gift to humans. Those in the ninth circle, the traitors to friends, family, and country, are frozen in ice, a most fitting punishment for their icy hearts. Though logically all the sinners in hell suffer the same consequence - eternal separation from the presence and love of God - those in the lower regions of hell have committed more serious sins and suffer more. In the very pit of hell, excoriated in the three mouths of icebound Satan, lie the arch-betrayers of all time: Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot.

Frost's "Fire and Ice" contains this same organizational pattern. The understated opening two lines, "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 it first 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"). In addition, by aligning the poem's speaker with a group of others ("I hold with those who favor fire"), Frost implies this is a more common and less serious sin.

When Frost speaks of hatred, however, instead of seeing it as an emotion or feeling, like anger, he presents it as a consequence of thought, of conscious choice: "I think I know enough of hate / To say that for destruction ice / Is also great / And would suffice." The emphasis here, as in Dante, is on reason, or better, on the perversion or misuse of reason, because it is employed not for Christian love but for hatred. The intellectual distancing contained in the repetition "I think I know" the change from the present perfect tense, implying a past action ("I've tasted"), to the present tense ("I think I know"), and the utter isolation of the repeated 'T' without any reference to others mark hatred as worse than desire. Frost underscores this by making it the cause of a second death ("But if it had to perish twice") far more terrible by implication than the first. The pun on the word "ice" in "twice" and "suffice" accentuates the bitter coldness of hatred, and the triple repetition of "ice" at the end of the poem recalls Satan's futile efforts to escape - it is the very beating of his wings that causes the river Cocytus in the ninth circle to freeze.

Like Dante, Frost employs a first-person speaker in his poem. In his dramatic narrative, Dante creates a character named Dante to recount his journey. Although the author and narrator are distinct (after all, Dante the author did not hesitate to place characters in hell whom Dante the narrator pities), there are haunting, autobiographical overtones, as if the Inferno served as a warning not only to others but also to the poet himself:

Midway in our life's journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood [...]. (Ciardi 1.1-3)

In "Fire and Ice," the force of the lyric "I" similarly contains an autobiographical edge. The deceptively casual, even flippant tone of the persona masks a deeper, understated meaning.

Whether it is a stark admission by Frost of his ambitious and unforgiving nature or an exorcising of the demon - interestingly enough, Frost included "Fire and Ice" as one of the "Grace Notes" in New Hampshire (1923) - we will never know. But by modeling his poem in both structure and theme on Dante's Inferno, Frost has enriched considerably the meaning of his brief lyric.

NOTE

1. In addition to the internal evidence, 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 - two poetic translations 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 - could clearly have had an impact. I am grateful to Helice Koffler of the Fales Library for this information.

The torments of hell are first hinted at in canto 3, when Virgil and Dante, after passing through the Gate of Hell, listen to Charon admonish the souls waiting to be ferried across the fiver Acheron. 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:

I come to lead you to the other shore, into eternal dark, into fire and ice. (3.83-84)

WORKS CITED

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Martin Ostwald. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1962.

Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Trans. Jefferson B. Fletcher. New York: Macmillan, 1931.

-----. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside, 1895.

-----. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Vols. 9-11. Trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Complete Writings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 11 volumes. Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside, 1895.

-----.The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Trans. Charles Eliot Norton. Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside, 1892.

-----. The Inferno. Trans John Ciardi. New York: Mentor, 1954.

Frost, Robert. New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes. Woodcuts by J. J. Lankes. New York: Henry Holt, 1923.

Thompson, Lawrance. Fire and Ice: The Art and Thought of Robert Frost. New York: Henry Holt, 1942.

-----. Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938. New York: Holt, 1970. 

From The Explicator 57.4 (Summer 1999)

Tom Hansen: On "Fire and Ice"

Harlow Shapley claimed that he inspired Robert Frost to write "Fire and Ice." Shapley, who taught at Harvard for many years, was perhaps the preeminent American astronomer of his time. Although his name was hardly a household word, it was known and respected among the academic scientific community. In an address he gave in 1960, "Science and the Arts," Dr. Shapley told an anecdote about his encounter with Frost a year or two before "Fire and Ice" was published in 1920. Although there is no reason to doubt his account of that encounter, the poem Frost wrote as a result does not say what Shapley thinks it says.

According to Dr. Shapley, he and Frost met at an annual faculty get-together during one of Frost's stints as poet-in-residence at Harvard. Frost sought Shapley out, tugged at his sleeve--figuratively, if not literally--and said something like, "Now, Professor Shapley. You know all about astronomy. Tell me, how is the world going to end?" [1] Taken aback by this unconventional approach, Shapley assumed Frost was joking. The two of them chatted for a few moments, but not about the end of the world. Then they each became involved in conversations with other people and were soon in different parts of the room. But a while later, Frost sought out Shapley again and asked him the same question. "So," said Shapley to his audience in 1960, "I told him that either the earth would be incinerated, or a permanent ice age would gradually annihilate all life on earth." Shapley went on to explain, as he had earlier explained to Frost, why life on earth would eventually be destroyed by fire or ice.

"Imagine my surprise," Shapley said, "when just a year or two later, I ran across this poem." He then read "Fire and Ice" aloud. He saw "Some say" as a reference to himself--specifically to his meeting with Frost at that gathering of Harvard faculty. "This personal anecdote," Shapley concluded, "illustrates one of the many ways in which scientific knowledge can influence the creation of a work of art and also elucidate the meaning of that work of art."

Frost also spent several years as poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan. A recent article by Sally Pobojewski in LSAmagazine, a publication of the university, shows that Shapley's misreading of "Fire and Ice" persists today, at least among some of the scientific members of the academic community. After quoting the poem's first two lines, the article begins, "For a poet, Robert Frost was a pretty good scientist, say astrophysicists Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin. Frost's fire-or-ice scenario neatly sums up two outcomes from their new study of possible future encounters between our solar system and passing stars" (28).

Like Shapley, Pobojewski fails to see that Frost's apparent directness and simplicity frequently mask, as Cleanth Brooks illustrates in Modern Poetry and the Tradition, his reliance on symbol (113, 114, 117). Though Brooks does not specifically mention "Fire and Ice," it is clearly a poem that must be interpreted symbolically. This is not a matter of preference. The poem unequivocally declares that it is not an astronomical speculation about a catastrophe millions of years in the future.

In several of his poems, Frost presents the outer as emblem or echo or distorted mirror image of the inner. The speaker of "Tree at My Window" notes, as he addresses the tree, that the two of them are dreamers--the tree so often "taken and tossed" and he himself so often "taken and swept / And all but lost" (9, 11-12). The poem concludes,

That day she put our heads together, Fate had her imagination about her, Your head so much concerned with outer, Mine with inner, weather.

A similar outer-physical/inner-psychological correspondence is in the concluding quatrain of "Desert Places":

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars--on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places.

The colloquial "scare" thinly masks the terror of this poem--not the terror that ripples through us when we vividly realize and almost physically apprehend the limitless emptiness of outer space, but the even greater tenor that washes over us when we realize that the ultimate desert places lie within us.

So it is with "Fire and Ice." Outer blatantly symbolizes inner. Fire is directly equated with desire, the kind that kindles antagonism and conflict. Ice is equated with hate. Fire and ice are born in the dark reaches of inner space, in the smoldering, ice-sheathed human heart. However, if the height of art is to conceal the art, then Frost is a consummate artist, because the terror in the poem is so casually understated that it slips by some readers undetected. The understatement is most evident in the fifth and last lines of the poem. "But if it had to perish twice," Frost says, as if the incineration of the world were little more than a passing sickness. "And would suffice," he concludes in a typically unemphatic last line. The use of first-person pronouns in lines 3, 4, and 6 also quietly contributes to the understatement, suggesting that the poem is only an expression‎ of lightly held personal opinion. This deceptive strategy of understatement leads Shapley and Pobojewski to interpret the poem as idle cosm ic speculation rather than an astute diagnosis of the chronic malfunction of the human heart.

NOTE

(1.) Although I was part of the audience listening to Shapley's address forty years ago, I imperfectly recall Shapley's account of his meeting with Frost. Still, Dr. Shapley made a strong impression, one that lingers yet. Bemused by Frost and viewing him as something of a character, Shapley presented himself as a forthright man of science and common sense, hardheaded but broad-minded. Therefore, the words I attribute to him--and those he attributed to Frost--must be taken as no more than approximations intended to convey the essence of what he said and to suggest something of the spirit in which he said it.

WORKS CITED

Brooks, Cleanth. Modern Poetry and the Tradition. New York: Oxford UP, 1965.

Frost, Robert. Robert Frost: Poetry and Prose. Ed. Edward C. Lathem and Lawrance Thompson. New York: Holt, 1972.

Pobojewski, Sally. "This Is the Way the World Ends." LSAmagazine 23.1 ( Fall 1999): 28--29.

From The Explicator 59.1 (Fall 2000)

Katherine Kearns: On "Fire and Ice"

Like ice shrieking across a red-hot griddle, his poetry does, indeed, ride on its own melting. One cannot, and Frost has ensured this absolutely with his unstable irony, make a validated choice between the fire and the ice, or between the language, so insistently mundane, and the potent oversound. Fire and ice are, after all, the inextricable complementarities of one apocalyptic vision: that endlessly regenerative cycle of desire and (self) hatred that necessarily brings the productive poet to scourge his own voice as he mocks both the poetic vocation and the state to which poetry - and if poetry then all language - has come. Frost anticipates modernism's lament and, it may be said, prefigures in his dualism its dubious palliative of self-referential irony. The lyric birds and the weary speakers tell us the genuine Frostian wisdom of achieving a commonsensical accommodation with the fallen world, while inciting at another, and ineffable, level a profound disquiet.

From Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite. Copyright © 1994 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Jeffrey Meyers: On "Fire and Ice"

The concise, laconic, perfect and perfectly savage "Fire and Ice," the antithesis of the long-winded "New Hampshire," belongs with the apocalyptic "Once by the Pacific." The alternatives in the title represent passion and hatred, two ways of destroying the world. The poem was inspired by a passage in Canto 32 of Dante's Inferno, in which the betrayers of their own kind are plunged, 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." The last, understated word in Frost's poem, "suffice," clinches the meaning (like "difference" in "The Road Not Taken") by rhyming with the two lines that end in "ice" and enclosing that thematic word within itself.

From Robert Frost: A Biography. Copyright © 1996 by Jeffrey Meyers.

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“Fire and Ice” (1923)

One of Frost’s most anthologized and aphoristic
poems, “Fire and Ice” demonstrates much about his
approach and style. It has an uncomplicated iambic
rhyme scheme and presents easily accessible metaphors.
But while on the surface it is an easy read, it
says a great deal more than is at first apparent.

The title of the poem, “Fire and Ice,” takes the
focus off what is being described, the end of the
world, and places it on the description itself. Tom
Hansen reports that Harlow Shapley, an American
astronomer who taught at Harvard for many years,
claimed that he inspired the poem. Shapley felt
that a conversation he had had with Frost about
how the world might end, whether in fire or in ice,
was behind Frost’s poetic invention. Hansen goes
on to point out that such an assumption on Shapley’s
part is a false one. He holds that the poem
must be treated as “an astute diagnosis of the
chronic malfunction of the human heart” rather
than as “idle cosmic speculation” about a “catastrophe
millions of years in the future” (29). In this
way, Shapley’s characterization is too limited in
scope for Hansen’s understanding of the poem’s
meaning.

While Frost takes up the subject of the end of
the world, opening by addressing those who debate
two “opposite” possibilities, the several layers of
meaning embedded in the poem suggest much more
than can be gleaned from a cursory reading. Frost
notes that “Some say” the world will end coldly, in
ice, and some say it will end hotly, in fire. “Some
say” is wryly derisive of the sort of light conversation
to be had on a topic of such magnitude. It is also
clearly meant to posit the poet as one who filters the
impressions of those around him and who arrives at
deeper and more meaningful conclusions.

The knowledgeable poet writes that he “hold[s]
with those who favor fire” because of what he has
“tasted of desire.” As Jay Parini notes, “the poetnarrator
seems to have been through the torrid and
frigid zones, to have loved and hated” (198). As in
“Acquainted with the Night,” the poet may be
revealing that he speaks of experiences of a personal
nature. The reference to the self indicates
much about the source of the poem. Surely Frost is
not just imaging an end to the world in general but
rather seeing a broader scope of endings, not just
through the extinction of the human race per se
and all that is in nature, but through our own various
endings on other levels—for example, in things

closer to the human heart, such as relationships or
love affairs. These too end either in fire (passion)
or ice (cold detachment). This returns the reader
to the choice of the title and the combustion or glacial
passing of any relationship, whether between
people and their hopes, dreams, and aspirations or
between human beings and the world.

The suggestion that the world may end because
of desire suggests much about the longings and
loneliness of humanity and the constant striving
after excess that can eclipse our awareness of the
consequences of our actions, particularly those that
affect the natural world. Fire is equated with desire;
ice is equated with hate. The poem hearkens back
to the Ice Age when he writes, “if it had to perish
twice.”

But to speak of the end of the world complacently,
as “if it had to perish twice,” and to say
that “for destruction ice / Is also great” is to minimize
the possible outcome to such a degree as to
highlight the ending rather than the process of
destruction. The closing line, “And would suffice,”
suggests a longing for an end, a desire that
needs satisfying.

The poem reduces a fearsome topic to a sort of
“Some say tomayto, some say tomahto” lightness.
The images are not particularly disarming, as they
are neither detailed nor gruesome, given the subject.
The end is accepting but not embracing.
Ultimately the poem is more or less an earlier
exploration of the ideas in Frost’s poem “Ends,”
making its message not so much about the end of
the world as about the end of particular relationships.
The later poem’s lines “Oh, there had once
been night the first, / But this was night the last”
echo the finality and resignation of “Fire and Ice.”
The poem first appeared in the December 1920
issue of Harper’s Magazine and was later collected
in New Hampshire. See SCIENCE.

FURTHER READING
Beacham, Walton. “Technique and the Sense of Play
in the Poetry of Robert Frost.” In Frost: Centennial
Essays II, edited by Jac Tharpe, 246–261. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1976.
Hansen, Tom. “Frost’s Fire and Ice,” Explicator 59, no.
1 (Fall 2000): 27–30.
Pack, Robert. Belief and Uncertainty in the Poetry of
Robert Frost. Hanover, N.H.: Middlebury College
Press, 2003.
Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York: Holt, 1999,
197–198.

From Critical Companion to Robert Frost A Literary Reference to His Life And Work(2007)  - Deirdre Fagan +

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ROBERT FROST
 SPEAKING ON CAMPUS

Contents

 Introduction
 Getting up things to say for yourself
 Where poetry comes in
 Handling figures of speech
 “Anxiety for the Liberal Arts”
 A book side to everything
 Not freedom from, but freedom of
 Of rapid reading and what we call “completion”
 No surprise to me, no surprise to anybody else
 Pieces of knitting to go on with
 Everything in the world comes in pairs
 My kind of fooling
 About “the great misgiving”
 Wondering how convictions are had
 Something you live by till you live by something else
 Some gamble—something of uncertainty
 The future of the world
 Hang around for the refinement of sentiment
 What I think I’m doing when I write a poem
 Of the “elect” and the “elected”
 Fall in love at sight
 Thinking about generalizations
 “In on the Ground Floor”
 A certain restlessness
 About thinking and of perishing to shine
 A gentler interest in the fine things
 Let’s say bravely…that poetry counts
 I’ll tell you a little about my walks
 Editor’s Note

 References

Something you live by till you live by something else

In speaking at Amherst College on June 6, 1958, preliminary to his poetry reading that was a featured part of the institution’s commencement weekend, Mr. Frost began reminiscently, making reference to Alexander Meiklejohn, philosopher and educational polemicist, who had served as Amherst’s president from 1912 to 1924. The poet, now holding a lifetime appointment at the college as Simpson Lecturer in Literature, had earlier been a member of the Amherst faculty during three different intervals in the period 1917–38.

IREMEMBERthe first time I ever spoke here. (I’m in a rather reminiscent mood this morning.) I was brought over here as a visitor by Mr. Meiklejohn in 1915 one morning. And I even remember what I talked about that morning and what trouble I got into for it.

I remarked, just offhand, that all the first best poetry is never set to music. I remarked that, and that brought several of the boys on me afterward. I remember their names even; we got to be great friends. I got acquainted that way, by saying something that wasn’t exactly so, but came pretty near being so.

And I was offended the other day by something I saw in the paper about myself. It said, “Mr. Frostholdsthat all life is cellular.” Holds! I “hold” nothing. And I wasn’tholdingthat about poetry, exactly. I wouldn’t call it a “tenet” I’d call it a “tentative.” That’s something different.

And, yet, it’s not a kind of academic thing that you put thisway: “Wouldn’t it be possible to take this position?” You see, just for the sake of argument. I always hate that, when boys say that to me. That used to be the fashion in the good old Meiklejohn days, to say, “Wouldn’t it be possible to take this position?” Just for the row, you know. And I always said: “Do youtakeit—for life or death, you know? Do you mean it?” I suppress that.

But this other thing, this “tentative” thing, is something you live by till you live by something else. It’s on the way. It’s where you take a hitch—make a hitch there for the time being—something you live by.

Now, I was thinking this morning I’d say something about the Tower of Babel. I have said that “all life is cellular.” […] That’s just an observation. That’s nothing to live by, particularly, unless it’s this: that there’ll always be families; there’ll always be countries. I needn’t worry about there not being countries anymore. Sometimes they try to scare me about it, that countries are all over and we’re all going to be one world.

But this thing is something to lean on for the moment, anyway: that all life seems to be rather cellular, makes groups and things.

And I went on from that to think of the Tower of Babel, which is blamed for breaking us all up into nations. It reached so near the sky that heaven got worried about us and decided to scatter us into nations, so we wouldn’t all come to heaven at once. Something like that; I suppose that’s the story.

And now we have in New York—with the money of a very famous family—we have a “Tower of Anti-Babel,” you might call it. It’s going to undo what the Tower of Babel did. It’s going to give us all one language, I suppose, make us all one world or one people.

That might make me anxious for the English Department, that I belong to; I’m a more or less faithful member of. But Ithink we must strengthen ourselves, as an English Department, so that when it comes to be one language in the whole world, it shall be English, not Volapuk or Esperanto or any ugly thing like that—and, most of all, that it shan’t be Russian.

You know why? Because I don’t want my poetry translated into Russian. I don’t want to translate it into any language. I hope that the world will go on to be English and give my poetry a longer chance of staying untranslated. […]

I’m going to read you some of the poems that I don’t want translated. When I see them translated in other languages, I have just enough of those other languages to see how miserable they look. They really do, in all the places I’ve seen ’em. There’s been a little, little glimmer somewhere.

I saw one little one in Spanish the other day, and I have enough Latin to do something with all those romance languages. I wouldn’t want to say it to you, it was so ridiculous.

The reason is—if you stop and think of it, if you know language, if you care for language—the reason is that the idiom is what gets lost. The words come somewhere near, but even those are just approximations. And the idiom just goes entirely.

When I say one of my tentatives to a class, I like to say it so’s to scare them. (I could well imagine I’m starting a class right now here.) At the beginning of the year, I like to say something that’d scare them so they’d want to hear what I was going to say the rest of the year—so they’d say: “Aw, that won’t do. I’ll go home and tell my mother on that.” But they can’t resist it. They keep following it, until toward the end of the year, they begin to say, “Oh, if he means it that way, it’s all right—if he means it that way.”

Means it. You see, it’s the tone you take with it. Slowly the tone of what you say gets to people, so they know how you mean it to be taken. And the verse has the advantage of prose in that.Something in verse carries a tone of extra meaning that makes it clearer and clearer, as you listen to it, as to how this is to be taken, this particular thing. That’s the all-important thing about it. […]

I often think that I’ve said things in poems, afterward, that were—long, long afterward—were indirectly answers to something that offended me in other people here. That conflict, you know; I hate direct conflict. (I wonder if that’s lack of courage.) But I like to settle it somewhere, and it takes time. And sometime you get a phrase that’s it, that’s the answer to that.

For instance, I heard here on this platform once that the boys were shown—you were all shown—that there’s no sharp line between good and evil. Evil isn’t over here and good isn’t here.

That had bothered me like fury, to hear that, because that is true that there isn’t. But there’s something there that’s being left out. And long afterward, in a poem, I said, “There are roughly zones….”32

There’s no sharp line, but there’s wavering lines—but “roughly zones” of good and evil. That satisfied me. But it took time for me to get to that.

It’s in a poem. I was answering. And I often think that many a little line I slip in is my answer to something that I didn’t settle way back.

Some girl said to me—granddaughter of mine, graduating from Smith, a year or two ago—she said to me, “Don’t you think it’s everybody’s duty to do good in the world?” And I said, “I’d rather do well than good.”

But she thought—(Wait till you hear.)—she thought a minute or two—(Sweet thing she is.)—and she said, “But wouldn’t it be possible to do good well?”

It’s a long time—(We see each other now and then.) andthere’s something to settle there. I let her have the field that day. She won, saying it would be possible “to do good well.” But there’s more to all that, isn’t there?

For instance, all the ways of doing good are human. They’re determined by the race, way back through the years. One way to do good is to be a doctor. Another way to do good is to be a preacher. Another way to do good is to be a teacher. Another good way is to be a plumber. You see, and go on.

I needn’t go on. There are all sorts of ways. And those have all been found by the race.

And one of the ways is to do charity. That’s what she’s talking about. But to make that the only one of the ways to do good, you see, that’s what I have to settle with her, still.

I’ve been thinking about it. She kept me thinking about it, that charity is one of the great appointed ways to do good. But to turn a government—(You see, now I’m getting political. I must stop that!)—to turn a government into just a charity institution would be a mistake, be as bad as turning us all into doctors, just making it all medical.

But all of these appointed ways are great. And I wouldn’t take away from that as one great occupation, the charity work—and the department of charity.

Then, there’s the department of justice, too, you know.

—at Wesleyan University, May 19, 1960:

TO MEthe greatest thing in the world is getting new answers. I think that’s been my greatest interest in life, new answers. Sometimes they’re just cute, and sometimes they’re deep.