Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice"

2007-09-12T15:24:00.000-07:00

I thought this poem was very interesting. I got two different interpretations out of it. I thought it was pretty easy to read, and it def made me think twice about the world we live in. I liked that the poem was short and sweet and got right to the point.

The interpretation of Robert Frost's poem can be looked at in two different ways. One way is that the physical world is coming to an end, and the other way is that the human world is being destroyed by certain things we do. On the surface it appears that the physical world would be the best interpretation because the first line says, "Some say the world will end in fire." I looked deep into the poem for another meaning. I used the metaphor Frost uses between fire and desire. He metaphorically relates these two things. Desire has some of the same qualities as fire. For example, our sexual desires are considered to be steamy and hot, just like fire. Sometimes our desires can get out of hand and we can destroy ourselves. In Frost's poem, he is expressing the possibility that as a culture "desire" just might have become so much of a problem as to destroy the world. For example, our economic greed has caused many environmental problems, such as global warming and the depletion of our ozone layer. It is not the physical world Frost is necessarily talking about, but the human world of culture, and this metaphor relates to this critical meaning.

Ode on a Grecian Urn

2007-09-05T18:16:00.000-07:00

Personally, I thought reading this poem by John Keats was very hard to follow. I read it once and was like umm what is going on here. I thought it was word, which made it that more confusing and hard to follow. The only thing that helped me understand it was that I knew something about Grecian urn's so after re-reading it the message was more clear.

In the first couple stanzas of the poem, the speaker is depicting scenes of musicians and lovers in a beautiful setting. He uses imagary of flowers, happiness, love, and ecstasy to portray this beautiful scence. To the speaker, these characters represent timeless perfection that only art can capture. The lovers will always love and the musicians will always play under trees that never loose their leaves as seen in this line, "beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare." The poem starts off happy, but then takes a turn as most poems do. The speaker admires the urn, but knows that the urn is not life. You cannot be happy forever. The ending of the poem about truth and beauty is a bit of a riddle. Beauty, in life, is not necessarily truth and the urn symbolizes that such timeless beauty is only in art.

Fun Stuff

Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice"

Ode on a Grecian Urn