224 Poetry for Students
day everything changes. Instead of the boy and the
other men coming home to a nice meal, the day
quickly changes because “the saw leaps out.” Here
again the Bible peeks through, as the sudden leap
of a sharp object recalls Abraham’s attempted sac-
rifice of his own son, or in the prophetic writings,
Yiftach’s actual sacrifice of his own daughter.
The saw jumps. There is some confusion, and
the speaker admits it with “however it was.” It is
unclear to the reader what is happening, which par-
allels the confusion of the characters in the poem.
The jagged grammar mimics that confusion, par-
ticularly with:
“But the hand!”
The boy’s first response is a “rueful laugh,”
but then the boy holds up the injured hand, both
for help, and to prevent the massive loss of blood.
The boy suddenly realizes what has happened, and
what will happen:
Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all spoiled.
With “all spoiled,” it may appear that the boy
is about to live life as a cripple. He then speaks for
the first and only time in the poem:
Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”
This disjunction in language—first “him,” then
the explanation of doctor, mirrors the confusion of
the actual accident, when what exactly happened
was unclear. The sister is begged to prevent the in-
evitable. And then the speaker explains:
So. But the hand was gone already.
The word “So,” all alone in a sentence cap-
tures the hopelessness of the situation. The doctor
merely walks in and numbs the boy. But sud-
denly—and this is a poem about sudden twists of
fate—something changes:
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing! And that ended it.
“That ended it.”—the boy’s life ends with that
phrase. The preceding description—“little, less,
nothing”—neatly and frighteningly sums up the life
lived. The boy was a child, or “little.” With his
hand gone, he was “less.” And then, with his pulse
gone, he was “nothing.”
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
The last lines return to the manual labor and
construction tone of the poem’s opening. This time,though, there is nothing left to build in that spot.
While the final line suggests that there are other
“affairs” to turn to, it is also a condemnation, with
no separation between the behavior of relatives and
strangers. Living is what people continue to do af-
ter a death. The only ones who truly stop are the
dead themselves. Frost may have realized that de-
spite the ending of some lives, the survivors must
go on. The living can only “build on” from there.
Source:Aviya Kushner, in an essay for Poetry for Students,
Gale, 2001.Sources
Frost, Robert, The Poetry of Robert Frost,Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1969.
———, Robert Frost’s Poems, with an Introduction and
Commentary by Louis Untermeyer,Washington Square
Press, 1971.
Grenier, Donald J., Robert Frost: The Poet and His Critics,
American Library Association, 1974.
Meyers, Jeffrey, Robert Frost: A Biography,Houghton Mif-
flin Company, 1996.
Parini, Jay, Robert Frost: A Life,Henry Holt and Company,
1999.
Pritchard, William H., Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered,
Oxford University Press, 1984.For Further Study
Frost, Robert, Poetry, Plays, and Prose,The Library of
America, 1995.
This is the definitive edition of Frost’s work, featur-
ing all of his individual books of poetry plus ninety-
four uncollected poems (seventeen published for the
first time). The volume also contains a generous sam-
pling of Frost’s letters and forty-five pages of notes
concerning publication dates and textual variations.
Parini, Jay, Robert Frost: A Life,Henry Holt and Company,
1999.
Of the many biographies of Frost, Parini’s is the most
recent and certainly one of the most accessible, hav-
ing been praised by numerous critics for its read-
ability and insight into an often misrepresented fig-
ure.
Pritchard, William, Lives of the Modern Poets,University
Press of New England, 1980.
Pritchard’s book is a collection of studies of poets
ranging from Thomas Hardy to William Carlos
Williams. The chapter on Frost, while not dealing
with “Out, Out—” specifically, is still an engaging
overview of Frost’s career and poetry.Out, Out—