<P> According to one of Frost's biographers, "Fire and Ice" was inspired by a passage in Canto 32 of Dante's Inferno, in which the worst offenders of hell, the traitors, are submerged, while in a fiery hell, up to their necks in ice: "a lake so bound with ice, / It did not look like water, but like a glass...right clear / I saw, where sinners are preserved in ice ." </P> <P> In an anecdote he recounted in 1960 in a "Science and the Arts" presentation, prominent astronomer Harlow Shapley claims to have inspired "Fire and Ice". Shapley describes an encounter he had with Robert Frost a year before the poem was published in which Frost, noting that Shapley was the astronomer of his day, asked him how the world will end . Shapley responded that either the sun will explode and incinerate the Earth, or the Earth will somehow escape this fate only to end up slowly freezing in deep space . Shapley was surprised at seeing "Fire and Ice" in print a year later, and referred to it as an example of how science can influence the creation of art, or clarify its meaning . </P> <P> It is written in a single 9 - line stanza, which greatly narrows in the last two lines . The poem's meter is an irregular mix of iambic tetrameter and dimeter, and the rhyme scheme (which is A-B-A, A-B-C, B-C-B) suggests but departs from the rigorous pattern of terza rima . </P> <P> Marveled at for its compactness, "Fire and Ice" signaled for Frost "a new style, tone, manner, (and) form". Its casual tone masks the serious question it poses to the reader . </P>

How many stanzas are in the poem fire and ice