Choose any one of the fictions and any one of the poems below, exploring in detail one major theme that the works share (i.e., the fiction and the poem). The fictions: "Araby," "Rose for Emily," "Things They Carried," "Hills Like White Elephants," "How to Talk to Girls at Parties," "The Yellow Wallpaper," "Greasy Lake," "The Cathedral," "Everyday Use," "A&P" The poetry: In A Station of the Metro, "The Sky Was," "anyone lived in a pretty how town," "Fire and Ice," "Living in Sin"

The two pieces which stand out for me from these two lists as a good pair for comparison are "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker and "Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost.
Frost's poem weighs up the likelihood of the world ending either in fire or in ice, where he equates "desire" with the former and "hate" with the latter. Both love and hate, Frost determines, "would suffice" to cause destruction, these being equally powerful forces. We can also read "fire" and "ice" as representing two different ways of expressing our feelings towards another person, either through the burning fire of active passion or hatred, or through the "ice" of being cold towards someone, so that "the world" (or a relationship) ends in a freeze, rather than a conflagration.
In "Everyday Use," the focus of the story is on how Dee, Mama, and Maggie all relate differently to their shared history and how they feel about each other. The motif of fire appears in this story too, representative of Dee's destructive hatred, as Mama interprets it, for the world she has inhabited as a child. Mama remembers her two daughters on the night of the burning house very differently, picturing Maggie destroyed by it ("her hair smoking and her dress falling off her"), while Dee wears "a look of concentration on her face": "Why don't you do a dance around the ashes," Mama wanted to ask her. For Maggie, fire is a destructive force; for Dee, there is a sense of cleansing in its destruction, because "she hated that house" so much.
Later, Dee's form of attack upon her old life is different—more akin to Frost's "ice." Instead of attacking it deliberately, she chooses to recreate herself outside of it, giving herself a new name and associating with a man whose hand feels "cold" to Mama. Meanwhile, at the end of the story, Mama's grand gesture of giving the quilts to Maggie, in rejection of Dee's claim that Maggie "couldn't appreciate" them, represents a rebuttal to Dee's thinking that they should "make something of themselves," which withholds things from her, rather than deals out the "fire" of active argument towards her. Passion in this story, as in Frost's poem, can be expressed both through active rage and through cold withdrawal, and each approach is equally effective.