Out, Out - Robert Frost

‘Out, Out –’ by Robert Frost is a gruesomely graphic and emotional poem about the tragic end of a
young boy’s life. The poem is about the New England community. The poem is about a young boy
doing ‘man’s work’ who loses his hand in an accident when he was distracted whilst operating
a saw. This narrative poem tells a story of human tragedy through the death of a young boy. The
poem shows how fragile life can be and how it can be taken from people in an instant. The boy's
tragic death is illuminated for the reader by a commentator watching the incident from the outside
looking in. It is a powerful expression about the fragility of life and the fact that death can come at
any time.

The poem is written in a detached manner and none of the characters are named, almost suggesting
that this could have happened to any of several children. The poem could be an allegorical message
about the poor treatment of workers at that time.

Inspired by the true story of a young boy, Raymond Fitzgerald, who died in an accident at a
young age, ‘Out, Out—’ recreates a true-life tale, in which a boy loses his hand in an accident,
the shock of which goes on to kill him. The title of the poem ‘Out, Out-’ is an allusion to
Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It alludes to Macbeth’s comments at the event of Lady Macbeth’s death
in which he says ‘Out, out brief candle!’. This effective use of allusion and the reference to the
candle forebodes the death of the boy as it parallels the end of the boy’s life in the same way a
candle goes off. Thus the fragility and unpredictability of life is conveyed through the dash,
making the title incomplete. The title raises the boy’s fatal accident from the level of ordinary
everyday life to one of heroic proportions. His death is like that of a Greek hero, an accident of
fate.

Death is always devastating, but it is even more so when the victim is just a young boy. The fact
that the boy’s death came right before he could ‘Call it a day’ leads one to think the tragedy might
have been avoided and there by forces the reader to think about life and death. This poem brings
the question of mortality to the reader's attention and shows that death has no age limit. Frost
creates sympathy for the waste of a young life. The poem opens dramatically with the tool that
will kill the boy. The object is presented in a sinister way before Frost relates the accident and its
aftermath.

The poem begins with the speaker describing the setting, a deliberately mundane scene, luring
the reader into a false sense of security, although the buzz saw carries with it the threat of
violence from the beginning. In doing so, the poem is able to show the suddenness and apparent
arbitrariness with which death can strike. A young boy is outside cutting wood with a powerful
industrial saw against the backdrop of a mountains cape. The speaker begins the poem with
vibrant and sound rich adjectives ‘snarled’ and ‘rattled’. These aggressive verbs suggest the
violence follow. The buzz saw is personified. It also refers to the primitive agricultural tool that
the New England community is using. An ominous tone is created by the first line of the poem
with the onomatopoeia “snarled and rattled” which connotes to the sound of a snake giving
warning that it is about to strike with its venomous fangs. The repetition shows how relentless
and monotonous the work is. It is almost as though the saw is an animal, or creature that will
devour the boy. The creature ‘snarled’ showing how angry and vicious the saw might be. This
personified onomatopoeia portrays the saw as a horrifying creature and foreshadows something

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worse or horrifying to occur in the near future which creates a sense of horror in the poem. It
is zoomorphised through its ‘snarl’ and ‘rattle’ and is personified as it makes ‘dust’ and drops
‘stove-length sticks of wood.’ The alliteration in “dust” and “dropped” suggests how violent
the saw is while cutting the wood. It reinforces the power of the saw.

The fierce personification of the saw also creates tension as it hints at a sense of danger lurking
beneath. Aside from its mentions of the buzz saw’s snarling and rattling sound, the opening of
the poem is almost pastoral—that is, idyllic and set in rural surroundings The poet creates a
tranquil and peaceful scene in the next stanza. The breeze is “sweet-scented,” and “five
mountain ranges” look over the boy’s family home. The sibilance ‘sweet scented stuff’ to
describe breeze that drew across and carried the smell of wood, is in contrast with the aggressive
image of buzz saw. The power of saw is juxtaposed with the feminine contrast ‘sweet scented
stuff’. Indeed, even the buzz saw’s threatening sound is painted almost as part of the landscape,
in the way that this sound seems to simply continue on throughout the day without any incident.

The speaker goes on to describe a happy scene in the country, on a homestead in the mountains
of Vermont. He creates this mood by using words and phrases such as ‘sweet-scented stuff’ and
‘breeze drew across it.’ The description of the setting “five mountain ... Vermont” shows a clam
and serene environment which is juxtaposed to the wilderness of the saw depicted through the
repetition of the word “snarled” and “rattled”. The reference to ‘lifted eyes’ places the reader in
the yard and makes them part of the scene. The reference to specific features of the landscape
emphasizes the titanic nature of the natural features. The reference to a Vermont sunset places
the poem in its American setting. Alliteration and enjambment in ‘there those that lifted eyes’
show how busy the New England community is with the survival. In this contrast the saw has
become the dominant factor as it is the aggressive being while nature is just clam. This
dominancy of the cruel saw over nature creates a sense of horror and fear foreshadowing
something disturbing to occur later in the poem.

The repetition of the harsh sounds in line 7 as the saw once again ‘snarled and rattled’ creates a
cacophony and conveys how the noise disrupts nature. The poem makes this sense of mundane
and everyday life abundantly clear: ‘And nothing happened: day was all but done.’ The end-
stop at the end of the line seems to make this final, as though the poem could almost end here
with nothing having happened. But one key word in the line foretells the tragic accident that is to
come: ‘day was all but done.’ This ‘but’ indicates that some event is coming to contradict the
apparently uneventful end to an uneventful day of work. There is only half an hour’s work left to
do, and the speaker, foreshadowing the accident that is to come, wishes that the family had ‘Call
it a day’ there and then. If they had, the boy would have lived—highlighting the fine margins
between life and death, and the way that seemingly harmless decisions can have dire
consequences.

There is syntactical balance as a contrast is made between ‘light’ and ‘load’ in line 8. The colon in
line 9 creates a sense of status quo as ‘nothing happened.’ There is a sense of resignation as the
‘day was all but done.’The first nine lines juxtapose buzz saw and mountain landscape.

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Through the use of onomatopoeia and repetition, the saw is also made to sound vicious when it is
heard to snarl and rattle. The personification and description of the noises of the saw makes it seem
like a major character in the poem.

The poet uses the structure of the poem to emphasize the tragic circumstances of the boy’s death.
Frost develops the mood of the poem from a calm and peaceful beginning that uses the senses to
convey the sleepy, relaxed atmosphere, for example ‘Five mountain ranges one behind other’ is a
perfect description of the surroundings using the sense of sight. The mood suddenly changes
when the accident happens to one of regret, which soon turns to fear. This, once again,
exemplifies the boy's immaturity. The boy is embittered at the incident, but is horrified at the
prospect of losing his hand. Though a child at heart, the maturity forced upon him beyond his years
enables him to see that his life would be handicapped without the hand. He eagerly pleads for it,
not to cut it off as a useless part. It is for the reason that he would never be complete again that he
dies, rather than the severity of his wound. He could no longer be the man working on the power-
saw and therefore his manhood was flawed in the process. The onlookers were shocked when they
saw what had happened and were even more shocked when the boy suddenly died as a result.
This is illustrated by the words, ‘And then - the watcher at his pulse took fright’.

The author’s tone is poignant about the boy’s poor fortune and disappointed in the reaction of the
people who witnessed the accident. The poet is genuinely sorry for the boy and feels remorseful
about losing a young life to the strained maturity of child labor. Frost expresses this deep sorrow
when he writes ‘Call it a day, I wish they might have said’ since that would have prevented the
boy’s death.

The personal pronoun ‘I’ suggests his own desire, he had restrained himself from adding his
emotions, but the sudden use of ‘I’ shows that the upcoming event is going to be horrific and
tragic that even though he knows what to come he wishes it might not happen. The writer’s
personal opinion foreshadows a tragic and horrifying event to occur and creates a sense of
horror.

The narrator introduces the audience to the sister who calls out ‘Supper’. This is when the
accident takes place. This is a home with gendered sphere as his ‘sister stood’ and prepared
‘supper.’ The use of personification “as if to prove saw knew what supper meant” creates a
sense of horror as the writer again shows the saw as a being with a mind of its own. Saw is once
again given sentience and is deemed malicious. Further the verb ‘leaped’ suggests an animalistic
picture of the saw which creates a sense of horror, as the buzz -saw saw the boy’s hand as
supper. The euphemistic phrase ‘Neither refused the meeting’ creates a sense of horror as the
accident took place so quickly that the young boy had no idea and gave his hand, this also evokes
pity for the boy.

The boy’s reaction is presented through an oxymoron ‘rueful laugh’ the boy was so innocent
and immature that he didn’t realize the reality of the situation and is still confused as to what
happened to him. The accident at such a young age creates a sense of horror. The boy’s effort to
save his hand ‘he swung towards the holding up the hand’ portrays his innocence. The verb
choice ‘swung’ emphasizes the moment of realization and despair as attempts are made to
prevent ‘life from spilling’ and ‘Then the boy saw all’ as his fate becomes clear. Even though
he has lost his hand, he is unable to understand that he cannot retrieve it back. This reflects that
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he is still a very young boy and creates a sense of horror as he suffers pain at a young and tender
age. The phrase ‘half as if to keep the life from spilling’ is linked to blood. The metaphor
emphasizes that he is rapidly losing blood. The metonymy of blood to life spilling as a result of
the boy losing his life adds up to the created horror. The short sentence ‘But the hand was
already gone’ shows that the boy had now lost his hand and there was nothing that could be
done. This creates horror as something more horrifying might occur.

The speaker recalls the idea of the boy’s entering the world of adulthood when he calls him a
‘big boy / Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart.’ The enjambment creates a contrast
between the dangerous job and the fact that he was a ‘child at heart.’ The use of ‘big boy’ is
ironic since it is a term usually used to address a small boy to make him feel important. The
boy’s pleadings to his sister—his only spoken words in the poem—reflect his age and create a
sense of the pathetic nature of his death. Dialogue is used with the dash and inverted syntax
providing a heartfelt plea to his sister. The boy panics about losing his hand, but the franticness
with which he tells his sister not to let the doctor cut his hand off also conveys a deeper fear of
mortality and impending death. The reader is moved, but the speaker seems cold: his reaction to
the boy’s plea is, ‘So. But the hand was gone already.’ The single-word sentence ‘So’ indicates
a short passage of time but also conveys helplessness and desperation. The poem mostly uses
end-stops at the end of each line, foregrounding the slowing pulse of the boy has he nears death
and capturing a sense of finality. The doctor then makes the boy unconscious with ‘ether.’ The
caesura ‘And then-‘emphasizes the death. The young boy's final moments as he lies down
struggling for breath with the doctor unable to do anything for him creates pathos. The end-stops
and multiple caesurae in this section slow the pace of the poem down, mimicking the boy’s
slowing heart.

The poet uses short sentences to build up a crescendo before the suddenness of the boy’s death.
The asyndetic caesural exclamatory line ‘Little-less-nothing!’ signals the intensity of the
moment. The triad of negative adjectives ‘little –less-nothing’ exemplifies the brevity of
existence, the fact that the boy’s life was fading away, his heart got slower and slower until it
stopped. The words, ‘No more to build on there’ are significant because they emphasize the
fact that it is a young life cut short, and the boy will never fulfil his potential now. His
subsequent death is met with shock, for ‘No one believed’ that such a random accident could so
quickly snuff out the life of a boy. But these same adults eventually view the death in a way that
shocks the reader.

The most horrifying event takes place in the end and the use of enjambment ‘And they since
they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.’, reinforces the insignificance of our
individual lives. The final lines reflect the speaker’s turning wholly toward an attitude of
detachment and seeming indifference. His final remark of how both the doctor and the family
‘turned to their affairs’ seems callous and almost offensive. Since there is ‘No more to build
on there’ and ‘they / Were not the one dead,’ the adults must continue their lives, bereft of
both the boy and any solid explanation for why he had to die such a terrible death. The detached
manner in which the others react to the tragic accident and the boy’s death creates another sense
of horror in the poem.

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Out, Out— is a single stanza poem written in blank verse. The unrhymed iambic pentameter
lines along with the unpredictability of the structure is symbolic of the unpredictability of the
boy in the farm. The free form also symbolizes how uncertain life is and how fast it can change.
The speaker has a somber, serious, regretful attitude, an ironic tone, and a vivid descriptive voice
towards the events occurring throughout the poem. The speaker is shown as a witness to the
story that takes place. The poem ends on a bleak note. The poem is narrated in the past tense
throughout, lending its events an air of inevitability. The boy’s death seems to be the event that
ultimately signifies nothing in the poem. The lack of emotional response could be the fact that
the others in the poem are unable to come to terms with it and have pressing economic concerns
to worry about.

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