218 Poetry for Students
Critical Overview
Since the publication of his first book (A Boy’s
Will) in 1913, Frost’s reputation and worldwide
fame grew tremendously, and his death in 1963 has
done nothing to lessen the number of admirers his
verse gains every year. When his poetry first be-
gan to be noticed, many readers and critics thought
of Frost as a gruff Yankee philosopher—an image
that Frost was very much responsible for cultivat-
ing. However, by the mid-1960s, critics began re-
assessing Frost’s work and finding it much less
simple than they first assumed. According to
William Pritchard, author of Robert Frost: A Lit-
erary Life Reconsidered,“The popular view of [the
poems] as essentially spirit-warming tributes to
man and nature had been replaced by a presumably
more sophisticated view of them as ‘dark’ parables
rather, ironic meditations played out behind de-
ceptively simple surfaces.” Today, Frost is admired
for his ambiguities and ironies more than for po-
ems like “The Road Not Taken” and “Birches,”
which, although among his most famous, are gen-
erally thought to pale in comparison with darker
poems such as “Home Burial,” “Acquainted with
the Night,” and “My Desert Places.”
“Out, Out—” has fared very well in the opin-
ions of modern scholars. Pritchard praises it as “one
of Frost’s grimmer poems” not so much because of
its subject as much as “the way its narrator pro-
vides no guiding tone of response—tragic or oth-
erwise—to the event.” Jeffrey Meyers, in his book
Robert Frost: A Biography,calls “Out, Out—”
“one of his greatest poems” but feels that its end-
ing is not a figurative depiction of resuming one’s
life after tragedy; instead, he calls it a “bitter com-
ment on the callous indifference to human suffer-
ing.” Finally, in his bookRobert Frost: A Life,Jay
Parini calls “Out, Out—” one of Frost’s “most af-
fecting poems” because he “allows the poem to
open into a complex and suggestive ambiguity” and
“leaves a good deal of interpretive work for the
reader to accomplish.”Criticism
Daniel Moran
Daniel Moran is a secondary-school teacher
of English and American Literature. He has con-
tributed several entries and essays to the Gale se-
ries Drama for Students.In the following essay,Moran examines the ways in which “Out, Out—”
dramatizes, in an American setting, the ideas of the
Shakespearean passage from which Frost took his
poem’s title.The title of Frost’s poem is an allusion to
Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the tragedy of a man
who—prompted by his insatiable ambition—mur-
ders his king and several others who threaten his
tenuous rule. Near the end of the play, Macbeth
learns from a servant that the queen, his wife, is
dead. After all of his scheming and surrendering to
the most base and evil parts of his own nature, this
news prompts Macbeth to utter one of Shake-
speare’s most sobering and pessimistic soliloquies:
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusky death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale,
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
The death of his wife suggests to Macbeth the
ultimate meaninglessness of his ambition and the
folly of all ambition everywhere. Experience
teaches us nothing, since the past only lights “fools
/ The way to dusky death.” And although time
seems to crawl for the duration of one’s life, that
same life can be snuffed out in an instant, as the
flame of a candle burns brightly for hours but is
extinguished in a second. This paradox causes Mac-
beth to ruminate on the meaningless of all human
endeavor: ultimately, despite its “sound and fury,”
human life signifies “nothing.” She “should have
died hereafter”—in her old age—but has instead
died now and reduced all of their ambition to dust.
The achievement of Frost’s “Out, Out—” is
that he replicates not the situation of Shakespeare’s
play, but the feelingof Macbeth when he learns
about the death of his wife. Using his trademark
locale (rural New England), Frost dramatizes Mac-
beth’s manifesto of hopelessness in a distinctly
American setting to explore the ways in which the
thoughts of a defeated and solitary Scottish king
are equally at home in a story of a Vermont boy
who dies from a bizarre accident. While complet-
ing this difficult task, Frost also explores the way
in which an innocent boy steps into the world of
experience and adulthood, only to find that this
world is a cruel and unjust place.Out, Out—