Volume 10 219
The poem begins with the saw having, liter-
ally, the first word—as it will figuratively have the
last:
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of
wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
This saw is no mindless tool; instead, it attacks
the wood like a pit bull, snarling and rattling as the
boy feeds it. This hint of malice, however, is down-
played in these lines, since the saw is in the ser-
vice of the family (making wood for their stove)
and the sticks it creates are “sweet-scented stuff ”;
the alliteration adds to the “sweetness” of the wood
(for the repeated sis sweet-sounding) and a word
like “stuff” belongs in the mouth of a rustic ob-
server, rather than a Shakespearean king.
The poem’s setting also serves to downplay the
initial ferocious sounds of the saw: “Five mountain
ranges, one behind the other / Under the sunset far
into Vermont” are not a besieged Scottish castle,
but generic elements of an American pastoral. Still,
the saw continues its steady barking:
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and
rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
The boy—the saw’s master, in a sense—de-
cides how hard the saw will work, and the saw
keeps at its work. The repetition of “snarled and
rattled, snarled and rattled,” however, hints to the
reader that everything can change—like Macbeth’s
marriage—in an instant. The mountain ranges are
a beautiful sight, but the snarling of the saw adds
a touch of menace.
The speaker’s regret about the events he is
about to describe colors his descriptions of what he
wisheshad happened moments before the accident:
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
These lines emphasize the boy’s innocence: al-
though he was using a buzz saw (a dangerous piece
of “adult” machinery), he was, the speaker stresses,
still a boy. “Call it a day” is a phrase used by adults
to tell other adults to stop working; all the boy (any
boy) really wants is another half hour in which to
play. Later, the boy is described as a “big boy / Do-
ing a man’s work, though a child at heart,” and the
above passage underscores the boy’s youth to make
his eventual death more shocking and inexplicable.
(Note that the boy’s sister is also a child playfully
pretending to belong to the world of adults, an-
nouncing “Supper” in her apron). While kids pre-
tending to be adults (by doing adult chores or wear-
ing adult clothes, for example) are often viewed as
cute, this boy’s dabbling with adulthood proves
deadly because adults diemore often than children
as part of the natural order of things.
When the accident occurs, the speaker cannot
rationalize or even describe it in definitive terms.
Frost replicates this observer’s struggle to put the
accident in a logical sequence of cause-and-effect:
At the word, the saw,
As if to prove it knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The speaker can only offer an explanation of
the accident based on the premise that the saw
gained a moment of sentience and attacked the
boy—but the speaker also knows that this is im-
possible, so he qualifies his explanation with “or
seemedto leap” before admitting, “He must have
given the hand” and that “Neither refused the meet-
ing.” The speaker is, in effect, doing with his de-
scription of the accident what humans often do
when faced with an inexplicable event or an unex-
pected death: trying to find a reason, a cause, for
what has occurred. The poem as a whole, however,
suggests that for something like this accident there
isno reason. All a person can say is, “But the
hand!”—all an observer can do is proclaim his own
shock. Thus, the initial personification of the sawOut, Out—Using his trademark
locale (rural New England),
Frost dramatizes
Macbeth’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.”