Describe the imagery in "Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost.

According to astronomer Harrow Shapely, the poem Fire
and Ice was created due to a conversation he had with Robert Frost. The topic of the
end of the world came up and Shapely told Frost that Earth would be destroyed one of two ways: 1)
The sun would explode and roast the earth or 2) Earth would be somehow saved from the destruction
of the sun, but it would freeze due to the lack of heat and light provided by the sun. A second
theory about the inspiration of the poem is that Dante’s Inferno inspired
Frost. According to several historians, he wrote the poem after reading the section about how
traitors are frozen in ice as hell burns around them.

The imagery
in the poem surrounds the tactile feelings attributed to the heat and the cold. Fire gives heat.
A little heat is pleasing and comfortable, but too much fire results in pain and death. Likewise,
the cool nature of ice can be good in moderation by soothing a sore muscle or cooling off the
body on a hot day, but too much and the appendages are destroyed through frostbite. Fire and Ice
are also great forces in nature for change. Fire can destroy forests that have stood for
thousands of years in a matter of hours and Ice can rip apart mountains by seeping in as water
and expanding as ice.

Using this imagery, Frost alludes that the
human emotion of desire is much like fire. Like fire, desire feels good. However, desire like
fire, if allowed to run out of control is a destructive force. Likewise, the imagery of ice in
connection to hate- hate seeps in and expands. Hate's destructive nature rips apart lives and
people by seeping in and expanding until it breaks bonds that were once strong.