Cold inside a furnace, hills under the water, a sea in the middle of the sand: the poem "Two Faces," credited to Metaphor, begins by turning the world's expectations inside out. Each of its first three lines hides a contradiction. The fourth line places the speaker among them: "In this world, there is me." Then comes a separate, sudden line, "To burn it!", which changes the tone completely. The central idea seems to be that opposites live inside one another, and that the speaker feels like one of those opposites, a presence that doesn't quite fit the world's logic. The title points to this doubleness. The poem has two faces, and so, perhaps, does the voice speaking.
The construction is simple, and the simplicity is deliberate. Three lines use the same frame, "In the…, there are/is…", a repetition that makes the poem sound like a chant or a riddle. The rhymes come in couplets, "chills" with "hills" and "sea" with "me," so the sound pairs things up just as the images do. A small grammatical shift is easy to miss. The first two lines say "there are," with plural chills and hills, while the next two say "there is," with a singular sea and a singular me. The poem moves from the many to the one. By my count the lines also shrink slightly, from about eight syllables to six, so the verse tightens around its final word, "me." That word is short, open and personal, and it is the last thing we hear before the poem breaks off.
The imagery works by reversal. An inferno should mean heat, yet the poem puts chills inside it. The ocean should be flat water, yet it holds hills. Judging by the imagery, this could mean waves rising like slopes, or a seabed with its own landscape. The desert should be dry, yet it holds a sea, whether the rolling dunes, a mirage, or both. The last two examples mirror each other: the ocean contains land and the desert contains water. Each place is defined by one quality and secretly contains its opposite. The key word "world" in the fourth line is the widest container yet, after the inferno, the ocean and the deserts, and the thing placed inside it is the smallest possible, "me." The poem seems to ask whether the speaker is another of these impossible things, a cold spot in the fire, a hill in the water.
Then the poem turns. "To burn it!" is set apart and is the only line that doesn't use the "there is" pattern. It has no subject, only an infinitive and an exclamation mark, so after three calm lines of observation it sounds like an outburst. The word "it" is deliberately unclear. The nearest noun is "world," so the speaker may want to destroy the place that has no room for them. It could also mean the self, or even the poem just read. Whichever we choose, fire has returned from the first line, and the poem closes a circle: it began at the inferno and ends by calling for flames. A reader might also see this as the second face of the title. The first face is the quiet observer who spots paradoxes, and the second is the angry or desperate voice that wants to end them. Fire is the one force that can erase differences, since it turns every landscape into ash.
The poem is worth studying for how much it does with so little. Its pattern builds a strong expectation, and the last line breaks that expectation, so the reader feels the shock as well as understanding it. It also shows how a poem can imply a personality without telling a life story. We learn nothing here about who wrote it or why, and we don't need to. The text gives us a speaker who sees contradictions everywhere, counts themself among them, and can't leave the thought alone. The name Metaphor suits a poem built from equations between unlike things, though the poem needs no such hint. Its power is in leaving the final word, "it," open, so that each reader decides what is being burned.