Volume 10 223
Although Robert Frost would later in his life
become a farm owner, a husband and father, and a
four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, his
life was often marked by struggle, beginning with
the early death of his father and the untimely deaths
of his own children. Frost achieved wide acclaim
and popularity not only with academic critics, but
with the American public. Frost was even honored
as the nation’s Poet Laureate, reading at the inau-
guration of John F. Kennedy. When Frost died,
Kennedy said: “His death impoverishes us all; but
he has bequeathed his nation a body of imperish-
able verse from which Americans will forever gain
joy and understanding.”
Several decades after Frost’s death, one notes
in his work the dueling influences of success and
hardship. On the surface, Frost’s poems are about
apple-picking, birches, and putting up fences—the
daily activities of a peaceful country existence. But
there is a darkness rumbling beneath the lines, and
the ugly side of the human heart is well-chronicled
in Frost’s seemingly bucolic, quintessentially
American poems.
“Out, Out—” is one of Frost’s most chilling
poems. The title is a quotation from the last act of
Shakespeare’s Macbeth,when Macbeth says:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow
Creeps in this petty pave from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And is then heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Readers familiar with Macbethcan immedi-
ately catch Frost’s hint at inevitable death and the
swiftness of human life.
Frost’s poem begins ominously. They saw
“snarls and rattles, snarls and rattles,” alluding to
both the sounds of anger and the sounds of a snake.
“Rattle” may recall the snake in the Garden of
Eden, who was a main cause for the ejection from
Paradise and the loss of initial innocence. What’s
more, the snake in the Biblical story is the instru-
ment of betrayal, and thus the poem’s first line sub-
tly introduces the idea of callousness toward hu-
mans’ fates.
The second line’s mention of “dust” again
brings up the Biblical idea of originating from dust
and returning to dust. The opening three lines are
memorable also thanks to Frost’s mastery of the
music of English. These lines have a distinctive
sound that mimics the objects they describe.
“The buzz saw snarled and rattled” uses the
“s” and “r” sounds of a saw cutting wood, and shav-
ing the strips to dust. The alliteration continues with
“dust” and “dropped,” followed by “stove-length
sticks” and “sweet-scented stuff.”
While the opening three lines focus on sound
and smell, the fourth line finally addresses sight.
The “and from there” emphasizes that the visual
description is coming last:
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
This juxtaposition of “lifted eyes” and “moun-
tain” recalls the Psalms:
I lift mine eyes unto the mountain
From whence will come my help?
After the depiction of the mountain ranges and
the sunset, the original sawing sound returns. “And
the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled.”
The ominous tone of the poem returns too, tem-
pered by: “Nothing happened.” The speaker then
interjects:
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.
This line hints that disaster is on its way in-
stead of the respite for which the boy might so ap-
preciate. Here is where the speaker shows an un-
derstanding of the ways of the country—a half-hour
means so much to a child.
The sister—a new character—comes out in an
apron and announces that supper is ready, as she
might have done countless times before. But on thisOut, Out—The word “So,” all
alone in a sentence captures
the hopelessness of the
situation. The doctor merely
walks in and numbs the
boy. But suddenly—and
this is a poem about sudden
twists of fate—something
changes ...”