The first frost of winter is one of the clearest markers of change in the annual cycle of life. Nothing quite signals nature’s hibernation, the temporary cessation of growth, like a crisp layer of ice settling on the earth, whitening the grass and freezing the surface of lake and stream. Little wonder that ice has come to symbolise emotional and physical demise in so many cultural and artistic contexts.
One of the most popular of all ice-themed poems is Robert Frost’s Fire and Ice. Nominally it is concerned with the question of how the world might end and widely believed to be inspired by Dante’s Inferno, where the worst of the sinners are damned not to the fires of perdition but to eternal ice. However, the poem is primarily a balancing of the destructive forces of the paired emotions of desire and hatred, each of them being considered as dangerous as the other.
In his sonnet My Love is Like to Ice, and I to Fire, Edmund Spenser uses a similar trope to exemplify the question of unrequited love. In Spenser’s poem, fire also symbolises desire, but ice doesn’t stand for hatred but for an emotion that is much more problematic for the lover: indifference.
Spenser’s images of ice and fire acting against their nature are echoed in WB Yeats’s The Cold Heaven. The title also mirrors Dante/Frost’s icy hell; a heaven that is like ice burning and yet remaining ice is not in any sense conventionally comforting and reflects the poet’s loss of faith in the wake of the end of his hopes of a relationship with Maud Gonne. The image of ice occurs at the beginning of the poem, but it underlies all that follows: the loss of faith, of love, of youth and of life itself are all held in its chill grasp.
All this symbolic ice is one thing, but the real thing also lends itself to poetry. In Gail Mazur’s Ice, it is the backdrop for a range of adolescent rites of passage in the form of an outdoor rink erected when the river freezes over. In Greenland’s Icy Mountains, the inimitable Knight of the White Elephant of Burmah William McGonagall reminds us of the dangers it represents for seamen.
The same idea, albeit somewhat more seriously expressed, lies at the core of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner when the ship’s misadventures in a frozen sea are the context for the appearance of the ill-fated albatross whose intervention enables the sailors to escape the ice.
Both these poems concern the dangers of ice for shipping, but Andrew Allport’s The Ice Ship looks at a potentially dangerous ship of ice. This was the idea of Geoffrey Pyke, an English journalist and inventor, who proposed his idea to Louis Mountbatten as an enormous, unsinkable aircraft carrier made of ice for the Royal Navy. The idea came to nothing, but it did result in the invention of pykrete, an almost entirely useless building material made of ice and wood pulp that has fascinated generations of nerds ever since. It is ice for Lego lovers.
Towards the end of the war that Pyke’s boat played no part in, Ezra Pound was incarcerated in an American army detention centre near Pisa, where he wrote what was to be his most successful book, The Pisan Cantos. He was held in a cage and slept under canvas through the chill Mediterranean nights. Tellingly, the last two lines of the book link this experience, ice and mortality in a way that makes concrete the more symbolic mode of some of the other poems we’ve looked at:
If the hoar frost grip thy tent
Thou wilt give thanks when night is spent.
And so, this month’s Poster Poems challenge is to write your own ice-bound poems. Whether it be on land or at sea, symbolic or real, a source of danger or a place to play, it’s time to defrost your inspiration and share the results here.
