220 Poetry for Students

is, in a sense, a lie—an attempt (as above) to offer

some rationale for the boy’s death.

Unlike the speaker, momentarily entangled in

explanations, the boy reacts in a childlike and fran-

tic manner that reflects his youth and inexperience

in a world where things happen for no reason at all:

The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,

As he swung toward them holding up the hand

Half in appeal, but half as if to keep

The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—

Since he was old enough to know ...

In this one instant, the boy crosses into the

realm of adulthood, where he is no longer innocent

of the world’s random cruelty. His “rueful laugh”

is a fleeting attempt at self pity, his balancing of

his hand on his arm is a fleeting attempt at self-

preservation, but still the boy “saw all.” He knows

what is to come, but retreats back into childhood

for a final plea:

“Don’t let him cut my hand off—

The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”

The boy’s biggest problem here is not saving

his hand but saving his life; symbolically, he is also

begging his sister to let him stay in the realm of

childhood.

By this point, the tone of the speaker has

changed from one of outrage to one of seemingly

cold objectivity:

So. But the hand was gone already.

The doctor put him in the dark of ether.

He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.

The “So” signals a change in the speaker’s at-

titude toward his subject—for what canan observer

say about the boy’s pleadings? “He pleaded well?”

“His cries made me feel sorry for him?” Perhaps—

but ultimately, all that one cansay is “So,” just as

all Macbeth can say is, “Out, out, brief candle!”

“The hand was gone already” reflects the speaker’s

succumbing to the reality of what is happening, as

the boy is about to succumb to the effects of his

“life ... spilling.” Entering “the dark of ether” is

like a journey to the underworld, and the boy’s ear-

Out, Out—

What

Do I Read

Next?

• Like “Out, Out—,” Frost’s poem “Birches”
  (1915) also explores the tension between the
  worlds of childhood and adulthood.


• Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (1923)
  explores the issue of transient beauty and (like
  “Out, Out—”) the fleeting nature of all earthly
  things.


• “Home Burial” (1923), one of Frost’s dramatic
  poems, depicts an argument between a husband
  and wife about the appropriate response to the
  death of their son.


• William Wordsworth’s poem “A Slumber Did
  My Spirit Seal” (1800) depicts a man who once
  thought his lost love beyond “the touch of
  earthly years” and who attempts to grapple with
  her mortality.


• Dylan Thomas’s poem “A Refusal to Mourn the
  Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” (1945)

toys with the issues raised in “Out, Out—”; in

it, Thomas explains the reasons for his notof-

fering (what he calls) an “Elegy of innocence

and youth.”

• “Infant Innocence,” a short poem by the late
  Victorian English poet A. E. Housman, treats
  the theme of an innocent youth figuratively de-
  voured by the adult world.


• Naturally, a reader of “Out, Out—” will find a
  reading of Shakespeare’s Macbeth(c. 1606) use-
  ful in understanding the forces that prompt Mac-
  beth to make the statement Frost uses as the ti-
  tle for his poem.


• J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye
  (1951) has as its protagonist a teenager unable
  to cope with the death of his younger brother
  and, in a larger sense, with the encroachment of
  adulthood upon his innocent self.