One thing we often forget about Robert Frost is his sense of humor. His occasional forays into a wry voice have the sound of a private joke. But the title poem of “New Hampshire” — the book whose publication 99 years ago prompted the Sun’s week of Frost in the Poem of the Day feature — is straightforward comedy. In 1959, at a dinner celebrating Frost’s 85th birthday, the critic Lionel Trilling spoke, saying “I have to say that my Frost . . . is not the Frost I seem to perceive in the minds of so many of his admirers. He is not the Frost who reassures us by his affirmation of old virtues, old simplicities and ways of feeling.” In fact, Trilling said, Frost is “a terrifying poet.” But Trilling’s observation is not in contradiction with Frost’s humor. In the “New Hampshire” poem “Fire and Ice,” for example, he writes about the end of the world. And the perfect diction in such words as “hold” (what else would you do but hold those who know desire?), he lets the terror and the comedy join.

Fire and Ice 
by Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.