disaffection is also a theme that icing repeatedly turns to. The short poem "Fire and Ice" captures the macroscopic picture of that idea. Favoring fire to end the world can be interpreted as a desperate longing for engagement, or "desire" (line 3), even the kind that brings on the end of the world, which, to reiterate Shakespeare, as it kisses, consumes. Yet destruction can come in many forms, as the likening of ice with hate demonstrates. In this universe, there seems no such thing as exclusively making tender connection. That would be too simple and direct.
Alienation is not the dominant but is an implicit theme in other of Frost's poems, although it finds variable expression. In "The Road Not Taken," the poet describes
selecting the "less traveled" option, which "has made all the difference" (lines 14-15). It is not clear that the road taken has been satisfactory, but it is clear that decisions made early in life carry the decider to one kind of life and cut him or her off from full engagement with others.
Thus being in or of one world inevitably makes one alien in some others. One cannot compress the whole of life, and what one does embrace offers no guarantees.
Contingency, separation, alienation, purdah: This is the found universe of modernism, which cannot be conquered. The most one can do, suggest O'Neill and Frost, is bear it. Is that enough?
O'Neill, Eugene. The snake-haired Ape: Anna Christie, the First Man. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922.
Frost employs nature imagery to illustrate the finality of solitude as the condition of compassionate experience. "Desert Places" depicts psychological alienation so strong that it just now needs reminders from an inhospitable natural world, as the images of emptiness and solitude attest: "They cannot scare me with their empty spaces / Between stars-on stars where no human race is. / I have it in me so more nearer home
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