Fire and Ice

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.

~ Robert Frost (1874-1963)


from The Hollow Men

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

~T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)



Mom told me about The Hollow Men, and I've always liked Fire and Ice. I was thinking about both these poems last night when watching the news. It was talking about the oil spill, and also about an enormous fire in Texas. Both were caused by humans' mistakes.

Mom told me that The Hollow Men was written during the Cold War, when everyone was terrified of nuclear wars, and thought that the world would end because of bombs. But T.S. Eliot's poem (you can read the entire poem here) describes how man will slowly wear out the earth. And the end of the world will come not with a dramatic bang! but with a whimper. The earth just fizzles out.

So I've been thinking about these two poems a lot lately. And about the size of the oil leak, and how devastating it is to the environment.  BP is saying that it might take months to stop the 50,000-120,000 barrels of oil flowing from the pipes each day. If man could cause a problem this tragic, then what will come next?

At the beginning of the year, I though that the earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, and Turkey were definitely signs that it is getting closer to 2012. Now I think that the oil spill is a bigger sign. The earth won't end because of natural disasters, but because of  man's impact on the environment.