Volume 10 215

“Don’t let him cut my hand off— The doctor, when
he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”
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: “And they, since they
/ Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.”
This “turning away” from the boy is not literal, but
metaphorical—adults know that grief must be con-
trolled, lest it consume one’s life. According to
“Out, Out—,” adulthood demands this kind of
eventual response. A conclusion in which Frost de-
scribed the sorrow of the parents, for example,
would imply that their grief could never be
abated—and although Frost is not implying that the
parents’ grief will only be a temporary feeling, he
does suggest that, ultimately, all people “turn to
their affairs” to some degree after a tragedy in or-
der to resume their lives.

The Meaninglessness of Life
Upon learning of the death of his wife, Shake-
speare’s Macbeth remarks, “Out, out, brief candle”
and compares human life to

a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Sig-
nifying nothing.
Macbeth sees life as a series of events tumul-
tuous in themselves but not leading up to any
greater theme or ideal. A tale literally “told by an
idiot” would be contradictory and illogical—which
is exactly how he views all human endeavor when
he speaks these lines.
Frost’s poem evokes Macbeth’s pessimistic
philosophy through its descriptions of the buzz saw,
the boy’s terror, and the adults when faced with the
boy’s death. The saw is, indeed, “full of sound”
from the very first lines of the poem:

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard And
made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood.
—and the personification is repeated when the
speaker states

And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
The “fury” of the saw, of course, is seen in its
“attack” upon the boy, when it “Leaped out at the
boy’s hand, or seemed to leap.” Similarly, the boy
is full of “sound and fury,” offering first a “rueful
laugh” and then a series of pleas as he tries to pre-
vent “The life from spilling” out of his arm.
All of this noise and motion, however, ulti-
mately builds to no great event or insight on the part
of the characters. The boy dies in a noticeably quiet
moment (“They listened at his heart”) and all the

reader is told of this death is that there is “No more

to build on there.” Flights of angels do not sing the

boy to his rest, nor do any of the adults pause to

consider the tenuous nature of human life. The boy

dies for no reason at all(for surely a self-aware saw

is no real reason), and his death leaves the adults

silent. The “sound and fury” of both the boy and

the saw have “signified nothing,” which accounts

for the chilling effect of the poem’s final lines.

Style

“Out, Out—” is written in blank verse: unrhymed

iambic pentameter, which is five feet of one iamb

(an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable)

each. Of course, Frost varies the accented syllables

throughout the poem to avoid having his speaker’s

voice become too regular and stilted; thus the poem

is still in blank verse, but blank verse that is highly

Out, Out—

Topics for

Further

Study

• Rewrite a section of the poem in rhymed, rather
  than unrhymed, iambic pentameter. Then ex-
  plain how the new sound of the poem changes
  its tone.


• Research what daily life was like on American
  farms at the beginning of the twentieth century.
  How does Frost’s poem depict the sometimes
  brutal nature of farm life?


• Consider the poem’s title. What weight does
  Frost’s allusion lend to the poem as a whole?
  How does recognizing Frost’s allusion affect the
  reader’s understanding of the poem’s issues?


• Compose a poem about a terrible accident or
  event for which there seems to be no explana-
  tion. Be sure that you end it with some kind of
  reaction to the event—as Frost does with the
  adults “turning to their affairs.”


• “Home Burial” is another of Frost’s poems deal-
  ing with the death of a child. Compare and con-
  trast the reactions of the parents in that poem
  with those of the parents in “Out, Out—.”