Out, Out—
“Out, Out—” was first published in the 1916 col-
lection Mountain Interval.Both the description of
a terrible accident and a comment on the human
need to resume one’s life after a tragedy, “Out,
Out—” is one of Frost’s most shocking and dis-
turbing performances. Like many of Frost’s poems,
“Out, Out—” is written in blank verse, with the
events described by an unnamed (yet characterized)
speaker.
The poem is based upon a real incident. In
1901, Michael Fitzgerald, one of Frost’s friends
and neighbors, lost his son Raymond during an ac-
cident with a buzzsaw; after accidentally hitting a
loose pulley, the saw descended and began cutting
his hand. He bled profusely and was rushed into
the house; a doctor was called, but the young man
went into shock and died of heart failure.
According to Jeffery Meyers (author of Robert
Frost: A Biography), Frost thought that the poem
was “too cruel to read in public.” For those read-
ers who associate Frost with folksy, homespun
philosophers observing the beauties of rural New
England, “Out, Out—” will be something of a sur-
prise—for the poem is,in a sense, cruel: the boy
dies a terrible death and all the speaker can say is,
“No more to build on there.” Even more shocking
is Frost’s depiction of the adults who watch the boy
take his final breaths. After his death, they “turned
to their affairs” since “they / Were not the one
dead.” Ultimately, Frost suggests, this “turning
away” from death is, sometimes, the only possible
reaction.
Robert Frost
1916
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