Robert Frost’s nine-line miniature takes up an ancient question — how will the world end? — and answers it as casually as a private bet. Fire or ice, desire or hate: the speaker has tasted both, and finds either one would do. What begins as cosmic speculation narrows quietly into something far more personal, until the destruction of the world rests on the flattest possible word — that ice “would suffice.” It is one of Frost’s shortest and most quoted poems, and one of his most quietly devastating.