Sunday Pages: "Fire and Ice"

A poem by Robert Frost

Dear Reader,

The Redux began with fire.

That’s not a metaphor. After all that’s happened since January 2025, it’s easy to forget, certainly for those of us who weren’t personally affected; but when Trump took office a year ago, Los Angeles was in flames. The Palisades Fire was still raging.

I wasn’t alone in sensing a dark omen in that fiery apocalypse, a great foreboding in that whiff of brimstone. Here was the Devil creating a hellscape—in Hollywood!—burning up 23,000 acres of the nation’s second largest city to prepare for the “restoration” of his fetid orange emissary.

On January 19, 2025, the day before Inauguration, 5,677 firefighters from all over California, from many of the neighboring states, and from both Mexico and Canada, joined forces to combat the blaze. Even at peak firefighting capacity, it would take eleven more days until the conflagration was completely extinguished.

Sunday Pages: "Redux"

A year later, and it is the exact opposite.

Today, a winter storm stretching from Tucson to Montauk will dump snow and sleet across half the Lower 48. (There’s an inch of snow on the ground here in the Hudson Valley already.) Temperatures, already much colder than usual, will plummet further into the teens, the single digits, the single- and double-digit negatives.

This weather forecast map, from Weather Underground, looks like one of the number sequences Mark and Helly were organizing to complete Cold Harbor on Severance:

As Helly says on the show, the numbers are scary!

A massive surge in our energy usage is anticipated. And if the national electrical grid is taxed to its limit over the next few days—if there is an actual state of emergency—all bets are off.

The good news is that the acting head of FEMA, Karen Evans—who took the job after her predecessor, David Richardson, resigned two months ago after Ted Cruzing his way through the Texas flood emergency in July—is one of very few competent, qualified leaders still working at an agency she has actual experience running; the bad news is that her boss is the Secretary of Homeland Security: the puppy-slaying child kidnapper, fork-tongued liar, and extrajudicial-execution enthusiast Kristi Noem, who wants FEMA to be DOGE’d. As the Washington Post explains,

Since Trump took office, FEMA has lost as much as a quarter of its workforce, according to multiple officials within the agency. Amid recent changes, dozens of employees in August signed their names to a public letter criticizing the agency’s leadership and warned that it had been operating under leaders who lack the qualifications and authority to manage FEMA’s operations.

Employees also said leadership had eroded the agency’s ability to effectively manage emergencies and other operations, including national security work, pointing specifically to stringent new rules and budget restrictions imposed by Noem, which require her approval for any expenditure over $100,000.

And unlike in California a year ago, if there is a weather emergency this week, we will be on our own. Mexico and Canada will not be sending reinforcements to help us. Donald Trump has frozen them out.

This all calls to mind Canto XXXII of Dante’s Inferno. That’s the part where Dante the pilgrim¹ and his guide, the purgatory’d poet Virgil, explore the Ninth Circle of Hell.

I’ve never been a big Dante Alighieri guy—if we’re choosing sides for medieval Italian literature, I’m staunchly Team Boccaccio—but since Inferno is basically Dante rattling off increasingly more inventive ways that all the horrible people who have wronged him or the rest of humanity are being ironically tortured in Hell for all eternity, there’s no better time to crack the spine on the early 14th century classic than during the Trump Redux. In Dante’s macabre conception, Lucifer has three mouths, which he uses to masticate permanently upon Judas Iscariot, Cassius, and Brutus; it’s satisfying to imagine Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Stephen Miller imminently replacing those long-suffering villains as Satan’s chewtoys.

In a very clever—read: I wish I thought of this—2014 Paris Review series called “Reading Dante,” Alexander Aciman writes up the various infernal Cantos as if they were news articles. The dispatch for Canto XXXII is called “Canto 32, or Area Man Discovers Hell Has Literally Frozen Over,” and begins:

INFERNO—After traveling nonstop for many hours through an array of chthonic geological obstacles, local political activist Dante Alighieri has found that the apocalyptic landscape has actually frozen over.

“I was supposed to be traveling through hell,” says Dante, who has seen everything on his journey from demons to the elusive and heavily mythologized lonza. “I thought the fire and brimstone would only get hotter as we journeyed farther toward Lucifer. There’s no way I could have predicted this—the ice, the chill, the subzero temperatures.”

The discovery will undoubtedly cause an iconological fiasco, challenging our contemporary of notion of hell altogether.

There is a moment in the actual Canto XXXII, eight tercets in, when Dante the pilgrim realizes that he is walking across a lake of solid ice, where the tortured souls are all frozen into place for all eternity:

Per ch’ io mi volsi, e vidimi davante,
e sotto i piedi, un lago, che per gelo
avea di vetro, e non d’ acqua, sembiante.

Longfellow, for many years the definitive English translator, phrases it like this:

Whereat I turned me round, and saw before me
And underfoot a lake, that from the frost
The semblance had of glass, and not of water.

But I prefer Mark Musa’s rendering in The Portable Dante (1995), which rolls more easily off my 21st century tongue:

At that I turned around and saw before me
a lake of ice stretching beneath my feet,
more like a sheet of glass than frozen water.

In his 1996 biography of Robert Frost—in my mind, the most important and widely-known American poet of the 20th century, if not any century—Jeffrey Meyers relates that it was this specific passage from Dante that was the inspiration for one of Frost’s most anthologized poems, “Fire and Ice.” I memorized that one for my poetry class freshman year in college, 35 years ago, and I still have it down, ahem, cold.

Unlike Inferno, which is merely the first of three parts of The Divine Comedy (possibly literature’s first trilogy), which consists of three cantiche, each containing 33 cantos (plus one for good luck), and goes on for 14,233 lines (not that anyone’s counting), “Fire and Ice” is an epigram of just nine lines, some as short as four syllables. I love the simplicity of the language, the asymmetrical meter, the careful ABA/ABC/BCB rhyme scheme—all of it:

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.

What’s great about Frost’s work generally, and “Fire and Ice” specifically, is that it tends to leave room for different interpretations. And with this poem, I don’t know that any of them are “right” or “wrong.”

The Clarkson University professor John N. Serio has a fascinating theory that “the structure, style, and theme of ‘Fire and Ice’ is a brilliant, gemlike compression of Dante’s Inferno. 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.” Serio continues:

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 diameter). 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.

My poetry professor—the late, great Roland Flint—told us to note that Frost equates fire with desire and ice with hatred; and then he smiled and let us make of it what we would. To me, “Fire and Ice” operates as an admonition: those two primal emotions, wanting and hating, are also the most powerful, and potentially the most destructive; don’t let those sinful passions get the better of you, Frost warns, or there will be hell to pay.

Reading the poem now, I realize that “Fire and Ice” somehow anticipates the Trump Redux. Not only did the first year of Donald’s second term commence with literal fire, as discussed, but it also began with an emphasis on desire: greed ($1.4 billion plundered), covetousness (Greenland, the Nobel Peace Prize), ambition (the ballroom, the proposed 2028 run), revenge (all that lawfare), and lust (the Epstein Files).

But now, 12 months later, we are, like those sinners in the Ninth Circle of Hell, frozen in place. The pairing of coldness with hatred is not a big poetical leap, as metaphors go. But there’s no way Robert Frost could have known, when he published the poem in November of 1920, why readers 106 years later would have little problem equating HATE with ICE.

Winter is not coming; winter is here, in full force. During this dark season, Minnesota is perennially one of the coldest places in the United States, and that is where Donald Trump and his hateful, vile, mendacious minions have elected to dispatch their secret state police—their own Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo, which is literally “Secret State Police” in Hitler’s native tongue. These MAGA Nazis patrol the streets of Minneapolis, terrorizing blameless residents, hurling teargas canisters at peaceful protestors, kidnapping five-year-olds and using them as bait, soliciting “Creep Sex” with minors, shooting smiling mothers in the face, wrestling VA hospital RNs to the ground and shooting them repeatedly in the back—all while the President, the Vice President, the White House press secretary, and the head of DHS lie to our faces, lie and lie and lie and lie, about what happened.

No less an authority on evil than Dante, in Canto XI (Musa’s translation), has something to say about this:

All malice has injustice as its end,
an end achieved by violence or by fraud;
while both are sins that earn the hate of Heaven,

since fraud belongs exclusively to man,
God hates it more and, therefore, far below,
the fraudulent are placed and suffer most.

The Ninth Circle is the deepest depths of Hell. You know which group of sinners is frozen in that icy lake in for all eternity? The scumbags whom Dante considers the absolute worst of the worst? What Judas Iscariot, Cassius, and Brutus all are?

Traitors.

The traitors are the worst of all—something all the treasonous GOP Senators and House reps would do well to keep in mind.

The most famous passage in Inferno is scrawled above the passageway to Hell: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” I refuse to do that. Because I know that in time, the mercury will rise. The ice will melt, the cold will abate. And even if we don’t see it yet, there is a way out of this.

If we can hold the line, we will, like Dante and Virgil at the very end of Inferno,

…[enter] that hidden road
to make our way back up to the bright world.

And like pilgrim and poet, we will once again know the joys of

the lovely things the heavens hold,

and [will come] out to see once more the stars.

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ICYMI

Fantastic episode of The Five 8 on Friday night. Our guest was the former British diplomat Alexandra Hall-Hall:

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Photo credit: Gustave Dore’s illustration of Canto XXXII.

1. Dante the pilgrim is the central character in the poem, as distinct from Dante the poet, who is the narrator. There are, as Mark Musa explains in his introduction to The Portable Dante, “two uses of the first-person singular: one designated Dante the pilgrim, the other Dante the poet. The first is a character in a story invented by the second.”