216 Poetry for Students
modulated to emphasize the importance of partic-
ular words and ideas. (The best examples of mod-
ulated blank verse are Shakespeare’s plays.) An ex-
ample of Frost altering the strict iambic pentameter
to make the sound echo the sense occurs in the
boy’s pleadings to his sister:
He saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”
So. But the hand was gone already.
In the fist line above, Frost substitutes a spondee
(two stressed syllables) in the second foot to em-
phasize the gravity of the boy’s sudden recognition
of his own death. Frost also dangles an extra sylla-
ble at the end of the line; the rhythm is therefore
somewhat uneven, reflecting the boy’s panic. The
next line is regular blank verse (again with an extra
syllable at the end); Frost lulls the reader back into
the expected meter, only to upset him again with the
next line, which begins with a trochee, adding more
shock value to the speaker’s comment (“So”) before
again resuming the expected meter. A reader with a
sensitive ear can detect this kind of metrical varia-
tion in almost every line of the poem.
Frost also uses personification when describing
the saw. Phrases like “snarled and rattled” emphasize
the saw’s apparent ferocity; the lines, “the saw, / As
if to prove saws knew what supper meant, / Leaped
out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—” reinforce
the idea that the saw is a sentient machine, suddenly
tempted into revealing its intelligence by “eating” the
boy’s hand. Ironically, the poem as a whole depicts
a personified thingattacking a living boy—who, at
the end of the poem, becomes as inanimate as the
thing that seemed to attack him.
The poem’s final couplet features a number of
important metrical maneuvers. “No more to build
on there” is strictly iambic, which creates the sense
of the speaker citing some adage or easily-remem-
bered piece of wisdom. The repetition of “they” re-
inforces the idea that the family is considering what
to do with themselves now that the boy is dead—
a major issue of the poem. In the poem’s final line,
Frost substitutes a spondee in the third foot, em-
phasizing the “one dead” about whom nobody
seems to know what to say, as well as the verb
“turned,” which suggests a physical and emotional
retreat from the horror at hand.Historical Context
The assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of
Austria by a Serbian nationalist on July 28, 1914,was a shocking enough event—but no one alive at
that time could have predicted the immense and ter-
rible ramifications of this single act of violence. Fer-
dinand’s assassination sparked World War I, a con-
flict so complex, bloody, and demoralizing that
historians still debate some of its causes and long-
term ramifications. The tensions leading to the war
had been brewing for years, and when the war fi-
nally broke out, the Central Powers (Germany, the
Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria)
battled the Allies (England, France, Russia, Italy,
and the United States) until the armistice was de-
clared on November 11, 1918. (In total, thirty-two
nations participated in the War.) The four years of
fighting brought with them over thirty-seven million
casualties, the deaths of approximately ten million
civilians, terrible economic ruin for a number of na-
tions, and, most ironically, the sparks (in the Treaty
of Versailles) that would later ignite World War II.
The devastation brought by the war had an un-
derstandably large effect on European and Ameri-
can values and assumptions. Many people (artists
and writers among them) saw the war as the end
of an era—the end of a time where the world, for
all its mystery, still made sense in fundamental
ways. The scale of death that people witnessed dur-
ing the war caused them to question their long-held
beliefs about government, religion, and the horrors
of which the human race is capable. England, for
example, no longer seemed the Edwardian paradise
many believed it to have been—now it was a rav-
aged nation, mourning the deaths of almost a mil-
lion of its soldiers. (As William Butler Yeats wrote
in “The Second Coming” (1919), “Things fall
apart, the center cannot hold.”) This doubting and
questioning of “old world” values gave birth to the
artistic movement known as Modernisma move-
ment whose practitioners explored the decay of au-
thority and the often-fragmentary nature of modern
life. Modernist poets created new forms and broke
with longstanding literary traditions. For example,
T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land(1922) is a free-verse
examination of hopelessness and despair; this
wildly experimental poem is, in part, Eliot’s por-
trayal of life after World War I. Other Modernist
poets who employed experimental forms and tech-
niques were Ezra Pound (whose Cantoswere first
published in 1917), Edgar Lee Masters (whose
Spoon River Anthologyappeared in 1915), D. H.
Lawrence (whose New Poemsappeared in 1918),
and e.e. cummings (whose Tulips and Chimneys
appeared in 1923).
Not all poets, however, embraced Modernist
ideas and forms—the reading public was still en-Out, Out—