“Whether weather be the frost Or the violence of the dog days”
Community readers hear Robert Frost behind the line: the frost-and-fire pairing - the freezing frost set against the violence of the dog days - turns on the same axis as Frost's "Fire and Ice" ("Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice"), and "the frost" carries the poet's name in plain sight. The hosts read the line for its weather wordplay and dog-days folklore; the allusion to Frost adds a literary anchor underneath both.
Uncle Jerry cites Fire and Ice as evidence that Robert Frost 'is not the happiest poet around,' arguing against the common optimistic misreading of The Road Not Taken. He says 'try reading Fire and Ice and you tell me if that's a happy poem.' This supports his reading that the road not taken reference in the song is ambiguous rather than hopeful.