The Apocalypse with a Timing Problem

A Poetry Tale about Robert Frost, told by Hello Doggo.

Here’s a story the astronomer Harlow Shapley liked to tell.

Shapley was a giant of his field — the man who showed that our sun is nowhere near the centre of the galaxy. And once, at a Harvard faculty gathering, Robert Frost cornered him with a question. How, exactly, is the world going to end?

Shapley assumed he was joking. Then Frost came back and asked again.

So Shapley gave him the scientist’s answer. Either the earth is burned up by the sun, or it slides into a permanent ice age.

A year or two later, Shapley said, he came across a poem. Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. Some say. That, he decided, was him. He’d been put in a poem.

Lovely. Except.

Fire and Ice was published in Harper’s Magazine in December nineteen twenty. At that point Shapley wasn’t at Harvard at all. He was in California, at the Mount Wilson Observatory. He didn’t arrive at Harvard until nineteen twenty-one, and Frost didn’t settle in there as a resident poet until the late nineteen thirties.

So either the two men had an earlier chat nobody recorded, or a great astronomer’s memory slipped. He told the story in nineteen sixty, forty years on. Stars aren’t the only things that drift.

Not that the poem needed him. Frost weighs up fire. Then he considers ice, which, he concludes, is also great, and would suffice.