Some of you might think the words and meaning in the poem ice and fire are not easy to understand and useless. However, I think the poem is going to be a good lesson source to high school students or even adults.
The first reason I prefer this poem is it involves some moral conciousness in its contents. The speaker warns about people who are one-sided to a part of something. People who are in “fire”, for instance, can not think of the sins of ice. That means they can be very firmed about the sin of fire, but they might consider the evil of hate(ice) to a samll problem. Likewise people who are in ice can not recognize of the physical sin(fire). I think it gives us a good lesson. When living this world we encounter many situations, whether they are good or not, we judge other people only using their personal’s standard. The poem points out the flaws of the “individual idea”, giving the warning that we must not evaluate someone carelessly.
The poem is a little bit hard to understand for high school students, but if they struggle with meaning to get the poem, I think that’s going to be a good study stuff for raising their ability to think. I have also an experience of reading very hard books that not being easy to understand. I read it numerous times to grasp it and I could figure out it gradually with improving my thinking skills.
Because we are human, we don’t have perfect thought. You can think you are right, but you might miss some mistakes you made. We have to think very carefully whatever we do something and if we make some mistakes, we have to be prepared to face the music.
