Volume 10 221
lier frantic cries are contrasted by his inability to
speak: all he can do is puff “his lips out with his
breath.” Once “full of sound and fury,” the boy’s
voice is now “signifying nothing.”
The poem ends with the speaker growing more
indifferent, although this indifference is more
philosophical than literal:
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little-less-nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
The boy’s death is described in the most
generic and unadorned language: his pulse slows,
“and that ended it. / No more to build on there.”
One might expect the speaker to evoke the passion
of Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That
Good Night,” in which he commands his dying fa-
ther to
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light!
—but Frost’s mission here is to replicate the
lackof passion felt by Macbeth upon learning of
his wife’s death. “That ended it” and “No more to
build on there” are phrases in which the speaker
stands slowly shaking his head with his palms up-
turned and his eyebrows raised. The speaker, an
adult, has already learned about the inability of any
words to explain why this boy had to die. As with,
“However it was, / Neither refused the meeting,”
the speaker can only fall back on indifference—but
this indifference is more of a philosophical stance
than a literal lack of concern: the doctor and the
boy’s family (collected under “they” in the last sen-
tence) return to their lives, “since they / Were not
the one dead.” This may strike readers as uncaring
and cold, but only if these same readers do not re-
alize that Frost is describing an eventual“turning”
to their affairs. Over time, “they” return to their
own lives, since there is nothing they can say or do
to bring the boy back or even explain why he had
to be snatched from them in the first place. The en-
dorsement of this attitude—that the world is a place
where random events sometimes destroy the inno-
cent for no good reason—is a part of growing up,
which is why, after finishing the poem (and even
dwelling on it for a long, long time), the adult
reader himself will, eventually, turn to hisaffairs
as well.
Frost’s achievement, therefore, is manifold: he
applies the philosophy of a fictional Scottish king
to a fictional Vermont boy, suggests that the ac-
ceptance of such a philosophy is part of growing
up, and finally illustrates the philosophy’s truth
through the reaction of the very reader to whom he
is presenting these ideas. “You are shocked, I
know,” thinks Frost. “But eventually, your shock
will subside, you’ll stop trying to rationalize the
event, and see that, in a very real way, Macbeth
was right.” “Out, Out—,” both the phrase and the
poem, are about all there is to say about a death for
which there is no explanation.
Source:Daniel Moran, in an essay for Poetry for Students,
Gale, 2001.Bill Wiles
Bill Wiles teaches and writes in the shadow of
Vermont’s Green Mountains. He has sat in the very
chair from which Robert Frost taught scores of stu-
dents at the Bread Loaf School of English. In this
essay, Wiles explores the tension between the pas-
toral landscape and the realities of rural life.The state of Vermont publishes a quarterly
magazine known as Vermont Life.On either its
front or back cover, readers will invariably find a
photograph of a farm scene. The house is almost
always white, the barn almost always red. If the
season is winter, readers see a field of untrammeled
snow. If the scene is autumn, the path filled with
fallen leaves appears untrodden. Spring or summer
photos usually portray immaculate fields or breath-
taking sunsets. Rarely will the reader be treated to
depictions of rutted roads, rusted pickup trucks, or
manure piles. The reality is that visitors to Vermont
farms are more likely to see those scenes that do
not make the cover of Vermont Life.In many of his
poems, Robert Frost tackles this tension between
the perfect world of the magazine photographer and
the hard-bitten reality of life on a rural New Eng-
land farm.
In “Out, Out—,” Frost places the action in
what might be termed a picture postcard setting
worthy of Vermont Life,but suggests that the peo-
ple who live on this farm may be just too busy with
the day-to-day business of survival to admire the
view. The visual brilliance of the sunset and the
five mountain ranges contrasts with the drab, com-
mon dust and sticks of the boy’s chore of cutting
wood for the stove. The pleasing odor of the newly
sawn wood as it is borne by the breeze clashes with
the onomatopoetic snarling and rattling, snarling
and rattling, snarling and rattling of the buzz saw.
The work of the day, uneventful as it is, has in-
truded on the idyllic rural scene. But, even here,
the day’s labor is coming to an end; the boy’s sis-
ter calls “them” (suggesting others besides the boy
are doing necessary chores) to the evening meal. ItOut, Out—