222 Poetry for Students
looks as though the next scene will be the large
family gathered around the sturdy table sharing a
meal of simple yet hearty fare.
Frost is unwilling to continue this pastoral
scene, and uses one of his more confusing transi-
tional lines: “ ... the saw / ... / Leaped out at the
boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—” Jay Parini in
Robert Frost: A Lifestates that “perhaps the saw
was animate and malicious.” Also, Parini suggests
that Frost has made the world of technology “omi-
nous, even rapacious,” a reaction against the in-
dustrialization of farming.
This contrast between the postcard view of the
opening six lines outlines the tension the romantic
notion of living in the country at the beginning of
the twentieth century and the harsh realities of farm
life before rural electrification, radio, paved roads,
telephone, and other modern conveniences. Live-
stock died from a variety of ailments and problems.
So too did many of the human inhabitants as well,
young and old. Disease, sickness, and accidents
took their toll. Communicable diseases, such as in-
fluenza, hit rural pockets of New England very
hard. Children were especially vulnerable. Entire
families perished. It would be easy for a lesser poet
to surrender to despair.
Frost, however, turns his attention to those who
remain, even as the boy’s blood spills onto the
rocky New England soil. Frost notes the sister, the
doctor, the “watcher at [the boy’s] pulse,” and they
who “were not the one dead.” Frost is sometimes
taken to task for this seeming indifference on the
part of the survivors, but the idea fits squarely with
the way of life on the farm. Cows have to be
milked; animals have to be fed and watered; wood
still has to be cut for the stove. Donald Grenier inRobert Frost: The Poet and His Criticsmentions
the observations of Radcliffe Squires from The Ma-
jor Themes of Robert Frost:“‘Out, Out—’ show[s]
the human watchers experiencing normal griefs and
yet convinced that life’s more important task is to
keep living ...”
It is the boy’s immediate reaction to the acci-
dent that piques the reader’s interest. Parini de-
scribes the “rueful laugh” as a “familiar Frostian
note” where both the reader and the boy see the
irony of the boy’s fate. Everything—the boy’s life,
the family unit, as well as the boy’s hand—is ru-
ined (“spoiled”). There is little room for a boy who
cannot “pull his weight” in the subsistence econ-
omy of a rural farming, “circumstances are such,”
Parini states, “that an extra ‘hand’ is essential for
survival.”
Another personage haunts the entire poem—
the speaker of the title words, Macbeth. Frost ap-
pears to compare Macbeth’s expression of futility
to the boy’s rueful laugh. There are, however,
marked differences in the two views of existence.
Macbeth sees only the “sound and the fury” of life.
His own “vaunting ambition” clouds his ability to
accept responsibility for the present death of Lady
Macbeth, the deaths of Duncan, Banquo, and the
family of Macduff, and his own impending death.
The boy, on the other hand, sees his own value to
the family and community plummet to nothing
when he loses his hand. He can no longer con-
tribute; his role shifts in an instant from worker to
liability. His death, in a practical way, saved the
family and small community from carrying a non-
productive member. “No more to build on there ...”
Macbeth lives in a universe where nothing is what
it seems. (“Fair is foul; foul is fair / Hover through
the fog and filthy air.”) What appears beautiful on
the surface has a center filled with ugliness. The
boy inhabits a world where the natural beauty of
the New England mountains and the hazards of
farm work exist side by side. One has a reality that
is carefully hidden and concealed; the other ex-
hibits a painful reality cheek by jowl with sweet-
scented breezes and a mountain sunset.
Source:Bill Wiles, in an essay for Poetry for Students,Gale,
2001.Aviya Kushner
Aviya Kushner discusses Robert Frost’s poem
“Out, Out—”and how its often subtle references to
the Bibleand Shakespeare’sMacbeth inform the
reading of this poem, emphasizing its more serious
and darker tones.Out, Out—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.”