Out, Out—

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Out, Out—

Robert Frost 1916

“Out, Out—” was first published in the 1916 collection Mountain Interval. Both the description of a terrible accident and a comment on the human need to resume one’s life after a tragedy, “Out, Out—” is one of Frost’s most shocking and disturbing performances. Like many of Frost’s poems, “Out, Out—” is written in blank verse, with the events described by an unnamed (yet characterized) speaker.

The poem is based upon a real incident. In 1901, Michael Fitzgerald, one of Frost’s friends and neighbors, lost his son Raymond during an accident with a buzzsaw; after accidentally hitting a loose pulley, the saw descended and began cutting his hand. He bled profusely and was rushed into the house; a doctor was called, but the young man went into shock and died of heart failure.

According to Jeffery Meyers (author of Robert Frost: A Biography), Frost thought that the poem was “too cruel to read in public.” For those readers who associate Frost with folksy, homespun philosophers observing the beauties of rural New England, “Out, Out—” will be something of a surprise—for the poem is, in a sense, cruel: the boy dies a terrible death and all the speaker can say is, “No more to build on there.” Even more shocking is Frost’s depiction of the adults who watch the boy take his final breaths. After his death, they “turned to their affairs” since “they / Were not the one dead.” Ultimately, Frost suggests, this “turning away” from death is, sometimes, the only possible reaction.

Author Biography

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874; his father, William, was a journalist and his mother, Isabel, was a schoolteacher. After William’s death (from tuberculosis) in 1885, Frost’s mother moved herself, Robert, and his sister, Jeanie, to the east, eventually settling in Salem, Massachusetts in 1886. Frost graduated as co-valedictorian of his high school class in 1892. (He shared this auspicious title with Elinor White, who he courted and eventually married.) Frost enrolled in Dartmouth College but did not complete his first semester. (The school eventually awarded him two honorary degrees.) After dropping out, he tried to persuade Elinor to marry him, but she wanted to first finish her studies at St. Lawrence University. Distraught, Frost left New England and roamed about Virginia’s Dismal Swamp for a short time; Elinor managed to graduate in three years and married Frost in 1885. The couple had five children, although their lives were marked by tragedy: Elliott, their first son, died of cholera at the age of four; Marjorie, their youngest daughter, died after giving birth at the age of twenty-nine; Elinor died in 1938; their son Carol committed suicide in 1940; and their daughter Irma was committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1947.

The history of Frost’s career as a poet is much more a story of success and triumph. His first published poem was “My Butterfly: An Elegy,” collected in a little book of five poems called Twilight (1894) which Frost had privately printed. (He had only two copies made—one for Elinor and one for himself.) After an unsuccessful attempt at farming and struggling to have his poems read by a wider audience, Frost moved his family to England in 1912. It was there that Frost published his first two “real” books of poetry: A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914). These books showed tremendous promise and were reviewed favorably by the American poet Ezra Pound.

In part because of World War I, Frost moved back to the United States in 1915 and continued to fulfill the promise of his first two books. In 1916 he published Mountain Interval, containing “Birches,” “The Road Not Taken,” and “Out, Out–.” 1923 saw the publication of West Running Brook and New Hampshire, containing “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and in 1924 Frost won the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes. Other collections followed: A Further Range (1936), A Witness Tree (1942), Steeple Bush (1947), and In The Clearing (1962).

Frost cultivated a public persona that his students, critics, and biographers have found, by turns, irritable, fascinating, and impenetrable—as the number of books on Frost’s life and work makes clear. His most notable moment in the public eye was when he read “The Gift Outright” at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961. Frost died in 1963 two months before his eighty-ninth birthday. As household a name as any poet could hope to become, Frost enjoyed universal fame for both his cheerful observations and his dark, often disturbing, ambiguities. His Complete Poems appeared in 1967.

Poem Text

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard 
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of
       wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other             5
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and
       rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said           10
To please the boy by giving him the half hour

That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside them in her apron
To tell them “Supper.” At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,          15
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand          20
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, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand       25
       off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”
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.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.       30
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.

Poem Summary

Lines 1-3

The poem begins with a description of the buzz saw that later “attacks” the unnamed boy. Frost personifies the saw, saying it “snarled and rattled.” He also contrasts the harsh noise of the saw with the “sweet” scent of the wood that the saw cuts into pieces. This is the first of the poem’s several contrasts (including serenity and violence, youth and adulthood, panic and calm, speech and silence, and, of course, life and death).

Lines 4-8

Frost clarifies the setting in these lines: the action is occurring in rural Vermont, and from where the boy is working one can see five mountain ranges. This peaceful and picturesque sight, like the “sweet-scented” wood mentioned earlier, contrasts the horrors that are about to occur. The sun is setting and day is ending—as the boy’s life will end at the conclusion of the poem. Frost reminds the reader of the saw’s power by repeating the words “snarled and rattled.”

Lines 9-12

The speaker expresses his wish that someone—presumably an adult—would have told the boy to “Call it a day”; doing so would have prevented the accident. The speaker’s wish raises the issue of the boy behaving (and eventually dying) like a man, an issue that becomes more pronounced as the poem proceeds. A boy loves to gain a half hour and be “saved from work,” but this boy did not (as the speaker hints) receive such a lucky reprieve.

Lines 13-18

The section describes the accident as well as the speaker’s attempt to make sense of why it happened in the first place. The image of the girl in an apron yelling, “Supper!” recalls the idea of the boy behaving like an adult—like her brother, she is helping with the chores and, in doing so, entering the world of adulthood. After her announcement, the speaker first suggests that the saw, in an attempt to show its intelligence, “Leaped out at the boy’s hand.” Again, personification is used to imply that the saw has a mind of its own. However, the speaker realizes that this is simply impossible, and qualifies his initial description of the saw’s “leap” with the phrase, “or seemed to leap.” His confusion over why such a thing happened increases in the next lines: “He must have given the hand. However it was, / Neither refused the meeting.” Ultimately, all the speaker can conclude is that both the boy and the saw had a “meeting,” which itself is an odd term, since “meeting” usually describes a meeting of people with other people, not inanimate objects. Thus, the speaker cannot wholly abandon the notion of the personified saw and, although he has already discounted such an idea (with “or seemed to leap”), he clings to it as one possible way to explain the boy’s otherwise meaningless death.

Lines 19-22

As the previous lines depict the speaker’s reaction to the accident, these lines depict the boy’s reaction. The reader learns that the boy’s “first outcry was a rueful laugh”—a decidedly adult reaction combining immense sorrow, disbelief, and an ironic commentary on the situation. The image of the boy trying to keep his hand balanced on his arm “to keep / The life from spilling” contrasts that of the “Five mountain ranges one behind the other” first presented to the reader.

Lines 22-27

After his initial panic, the boy becomes prophetic. (According to many old legends and mythologies, dying people could suddenly have visions of the future.) Since the boy is about to die a “man’s” death, he is “old enough to know” that nothing will save him after losing so much blood.

Media Adaptations

A double audiocassette set titled Robert Frost Reads was released in 1997 by HarperCollins Publishers.
Another audio edition of Frost reading his work is The Robert Frost Poetry Collection, released in 2000 by Harper Audio.
The Poetry of Robert Frost is an audiocassette featuring poems read by Carl Reiner and Susan Anspach. It was released in 1996 by Dove Audio.

The speaker recalls the idea of the boy’s entering the world of adulthood when he calls him a “big boy / Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart.” The boy’s pleadings to his sister—his only spoken words in the poem—reflect his age and create a sense of the pathetic nature of his death. The reader is moved, but the speaker seems cold: his reaction to the boy’s plea is, “So. But the hand was gone already.” This decidedly detached response reflects the speaker giving up his search for explanations for the accident. All he can say is, “So” (for the boy’s expression of terror needs no explanation) and “But the hand was gone already.” While the speaker earlier dwelled on the possibility of personification, he has now retreated into the world of facts. There is, ultimately, nothing to say about the boy’s death other than the facts that led up to it.

Lines 28-32

These lines describe the doctor’s attempts at saving the boy and the boy’s final breaths. The “dark of ether” into which the doctor guides the boy is like the underworld to which many mythological heroes journey—another of the poem’s ironies. When told that the boy “puffed out his lips with his breath,” the reader is invited to contrast this image with the earlier one of the boy running and yelling to his sister. Like all living things, he has moved from a world of noisy action to one of quiet stillness. Like the earlier statement, “But the hand was gone already,” the description of the boy’s final moments is shocking because of the detached tone in which it is described: “Little—less— nothing!—and that ended it.”

Lines 33-34

The final lines reflect the speaker’s turning wholly toward an attitude of detachment and seeming indifference. His final remark of how both the doctor and the family “turned to their affairs” seems callous and almost offensive (especially with he word “affairs,” implying that they all began riffling through their social calendars)—but one must keep in mind that the language here is more figurative than literal. Eventually they “turned to their affairs,” since there is simply nothing else for them to do. Since there is “No more to build on there” and “they / Were not the one dead,” the adults must continue their lives, bereft of both the boy and any solid explanation for why he had to die such a terrible death.

Themes

Childhood versus Adulthood

“Out, Out—” concerns a boy who loses his hand—and then his life—in an accident involving a buzz saw with which he is working on a rural Vermont farm. The boy is initially portrayed as a “big boy / Doing a man’s work.” He is using the buzz saw in an attempt to behave in a grown-up way, as children will often become their parents’ “little helpers” in an attempt to assert their independence and maturity. (This is what his sister is doing by wearing an apron and announcing “Supper” as if she is the matriarch of the family.) The fact that he is cutting wood with a buzz saw—truly a dangerous and “adult” piece of machinery—attests to his desire to be a “big boy,” helping with the chores. Despite that fact, the boy would be pleased with having been given “the half hour / That a boy counts so much when saved from work,” he continues sawing the wood for his family’s stove, willingly contributing to the literal and figurative warmth of his home.

However, once the accident occurs, the boy begins figuratively “Doing a man’s work” by dying like a man. In the second it takes the saw to “leap” at his hand, the boy enters an adulthood marked by violence, fear, and death. Although the boy wanted to behave like a “big boy,” once the accident occurs, he betrays his age by crying like a terrified child:

“Don’t let him cut my hand off— The doctor, when
he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”

His subsequent death is met with shock, for “No one believed” that such a random accident could so quickly snuff out the life of a boy. But these same adults eventually view the death in a way that shocks the reader: “And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” This “turning away” from the boy is not literal, but metaphorical—adults know that grief must be controlled, lest it consume one’s life. According to “Out, Out—,” adulthood demands this kind of eventual response. A conclusion in which Frost described the sorrow of the parents, for example, would imply that their grief could never be abated—and although Frost is not implying that the parents’ grief will only be a temporary feeling, he does suggest that, ultimately, all people “turn to their affairs” to some degree after a tragedy in order to resume their lives.

The Meaninglessness of Life

Upon learning of the death of his wife, Shakespeare’s Macbeth remarks, “Out, out, brief candle” and compares human life to

a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Macbeth sees life as a series of events tumultuous in themselves but not leading up to any greater theme or ideal. A tale literally “told by an idiot” would be contradictory and illogical—which is exactly how he views all human endeavor when he speaks these lines.

Frost’s poem evokes Macbeth’s pessimistic philosophy through its descriptions of the buzz saw, the boy’s terror, and the adults when faced with the boy’s death. The saw is, indeed, “full of sound” from the very first lines of the poem:

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard And
made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood.

—and the personification is repeated when the speaker states

And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled, As it ran light, or had to bear a load.

The “fury” of the saw, of course, is seen in its “attack” upon the boy, when it “Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap.” Similarly, the boy is full of “sound and fury,” offering first a “rueful laugh” and then a series of pleas as he tries to prevent “The life from spilling” out of his arm.

All of this noise and motion, however, ultimately builds to no great event or insight on the part of the characters. The boy dies in a noticeably quiet moment (“They listened at his heart”) and all the

Topics for Further Study

Rewrite a section of the poem in rhymed, rather than unrhymed, iambic pentameter. Then explain how the new sound of the poem changes its tone.
Research what daily life was like on American farms at the beginning of the twentieth century. How does Frost’s poem depict the sometimes brutal nature of farm life?
Consider the poem’s title. What weight does Frost’s allusion lend to the poem as a whole? How does recognizing Frost’s allusion affect the reader’s understanding of the poem’s issues?
Compose a poem about a terrible accident or event for which there seems to be no explanation. Be sure that you end it with some kind of reaction to the event—as Frost does with the adults “turning to their affairs.”
“Home Burial” is another of Frost’s poems dealing with the death of a child. Compare and contrast the reactions of the parents in that poem with those of the parents in “Out, Out—.”

reader is told of this death is that there is “No more to build on there.” Flights of angels do not sing the boy to his rest, nor do any of the adults pause to consider the tenuous nature of human life. The boy dies for no reason at all (for surely a self-aware saw is no real reason), and his death leaves the adults silent. The “sound and fury” of both the boy and the saw have “signified nothing,” which accounts for the chilling effect of the poem’s final lines.

Style

“Out, Out—” is written in blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter, which is five feet of one iamb (an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable) each. Of course, Frost varies the accented syllables throughout the poem to avoid having his speaker’s voice become too regular and stilted; thus the poem is still in blank verse, but blank verse that is highly modulated to emphasize the importance of particular words and ideas. (The best examples of modulated blank verse are Shakespeare’s plays.) An example of Frost altering the strict iambic pentameter to make the sound echo the sense occurs in the boy’s pleadings to his sister:

He saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”
So. But the hand was gone already.

In the fist line above, Frost substitutes a spondee (two stressed syllables) in the second foot to emphasize the gravity of the boy’s sudden recognition of his own death. Frost also dangles an extra syllable at the end of the line; the rhythm is therefore somewhat uneven, reflecting the boy’s panic. The next line is regular blank verse (again with an extra syllable at the end); Frost lulls the reader back into the expected meter, only to upset him again with the next line, which begins with a trochee, adding more shock value to the speaker’s comment (“So”) before again resuming the expected meter. A reader with a sensitive ear can detect this kind of metrical variation in almost every line of the poem.

Frost also uses personification when describing the saw. Phrases like “snarled and rattled” emphasize the saw’s apparent ferocity; the lines, “the saw, / As if to prove saws knew what supper meant, / Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—” reinforce the idea that the saw is a sentient machine, suddenly tempted into revealing its intelligence by “eating” the boy’s hand. Ironically, the poem as a whole depicts a personified thing attacking a living boy—who, at the end of the poem, becomes as inanimate as the thing that seemed to attack him.

The poem’s final couplet features a number of important metrical maneuvers. “No more to build on there” is strictly iambic, which creates the sense of the speaker citing some adage or easily-remembered piece of wisdom. The repetition of “they” reinforces the idea that the family is considering what to do with themselves now that the boy is dead— a major issue of the poem. In the poem’s final line, Frost substitutes a spondee in the third foot, emphasizing the “one dead” about whom nobody seems to know what to say, as well as the verb “turned,” which suggests a physical and emotional retreat from the horror at hand.

Historical Context

The assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria by a Serbian nationalist on July 28, 1914, was a shocking enough event—but no one alive at that time could have predicted the immense and terrible ramifications of this single act of violence. Ferdinand’s assassination sparked World War I, a conflict so complex, bloody, and demoralizing that historians still debate some of its causes and long-term ramifications. The tensions leading to the war had been brewing for years, and when the war finally broke out, the Central Powers (Germany, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria) battled the Allies (England, France, Russia, Italy, and the United States) until the armistice was declared on November 11, 1918. (In total, thirty-two nations participated in the War.) The four years of fighting brought with them over thirty-seven million casualties, the deaths of approximately ten million civilians, terrible economic ruin for a number of nations, and, most ironically, the sparks (in the Treaty of Versailles) that would later ignite World War II.

The devastation brought by the war had an understandably large effect on European and American values and assumptions. Many people (artists and writers among them) saw the war as the end of an era—the end of a time where the world, for all its mystery, still made sense in fundamental ways. The scale of death that people witnessed during the war caused them to question their long-held beliefs about government, religion, and the horrors of which the human race is capable. England, for example, no longer seemed the Edwardian paradise many believed it to have been—now it was a ravaged nation, mourning the deaths of almost a million of its soldiers. (As William Butler Yeats wrote in “The Second Coming” (1919), “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.”) This doubting and questioning of “old world” values gave birth to the artistic movement known as Modernism a movement whose practitioners explored the decay of authority and the often-fragmentary nature of modern life. Modernist poets created new forms and broke with longstanding literary traditions. For example, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) is a free-verse examination of hopelessness and despair; this wildly experimental poem is, in part, Eliot’s portrayal of life after World War I. Other Modernist poets who employed experimental forms and techniques were Ezra Pound (whose Cantos were first published in 1917), Edgar Lee Masters (whose Spoon River Anthology appeared in 1915), D. H. Lawrence (whose New Poems appeared in 1918), and e.e. cummings (whose Tulips and Chimneys appeared in 1923).

Not all poets, however, embraced Modernist ideas and forms—the reading public was still enamored

Compare & Contrast

1916: World War I continues, with Germany declaring war on Portugal and Italy declaring war on Germany. The war will continue until 1918.
1939: World War II begins when Germany invades Poland and Britain and France declare war on Germany. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt initially declares that the Unites States will remain neutral, but the U.S. enters the war in 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The war will continue until 1945.
1990: Iraq invades Kuwait, prompting President George Bush to begin Operation Desert Storm and defeat the Iraqi Army in less than a year.
1915: Robert Frost publishes A Boy’s Will and North of Boston, his two groundbreaking books of verse.
1943: Frost publishes A Witness Tree and is awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
1961: Frost reads “The Gift Outright” at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy.
1963: Frost publishes In the Clearing and dies later this year.
1916: Democrat Woodrow Wilson continues the first of his two terms as President; a Democrat will not be reelected to the White House again until 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt begins his three terms.
1963: Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson is elected President; his administration will be marked by the outbreak of the Vietnam War.
1993: Democrat William (“Bill”) Clinton elected President: after he completes two terms in office, his Vice President, Albert Gore, will run for President against Republican George W. Bush in one of the nation’s most intense and explosive political contests.
1929: “Black Friday” occurs on October 28 when the U.S. stock market collapses and ushers in the Great Depression, the worst economic disaster in U.S. history.
1941: With the U.S. entrance into World War II, industry expands at great speeds, and the country is pulled out of the depression.
1991: With the end of the Cold War and the subsequent phasing down of military spending, the U.S. enters a sustained period of prosperity.

with many “old-style” poets, such as Thomas Hardy, Rupert Brooke, Carl Sandburg, and Edwin Arlington Robinson. Poetry in English was thus at a turning point, with several of its practitioners demanding that a poet must (in Ezra Pound’s words) “Make it new,” while other poets focused on a world that seemed to exist only in their verse. It was in the midst of this artistic “Great War” that Frost entered the literary scene. He was forty years old when World War I began and had just published A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914) in England. (These were published in the United States in 1915.) A reader who skims the surface of Frost’s poetry may find him far from experimental, since many of his poems recall a seemingly idyllic life in rural New England—a pastoral paradise free from the terrors that had just gripped the globe. Such an opinion, however, falls flat when one considers that Frost’s poetry is often a combination of traditional verse forms and the dark, ironic sentiments often found in Modernist works. In other words, Frost was able to explore modern fears with deceptively “traditional” settings, perhaps best seen in his conclusion to “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923):

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have
promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And
miles to go before I sleep.

As history would reveal, the modern world did, indeed, have “miles to go” before it took the rest it needed after the even greater war which was to begin in 1939.

Critical Overview

Since the publication of his first book (A Boy’s Will) in 1913, Frost’s reputation and worldwide fame grew tremendously, and his death in 1963 has done nothing to lessen the number of admirers his verse gains every year. When his poetry first began to be noticed, many readers and critics thought of Frost as a gruff Yankee philosopher—an image that Frost was very much responsible for cultivating. However, by the mid-1960s, critics began reassessing Frost’s work and finding it much less simple than they first assumed. According to William Pritchard, author of Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered, “The popular view of [the poems] as essentially spirit-warming tributes to man and nature had been replaced by a presumably more sophisticated view of them as ‘dark’ parables rather, ironic meditations played out behind deceptively simple surfaces.” Today, Frost is admired for his ambiguities and ironies more than for poems like “The Road Not Taken” and “Birches,” which, although among his most famous, are generally thought to pale in comparison with darker poems such as “Home Burial,” “Acquainted with the Night,” and “My Desert Places.”

“Out, Out—” has fared very well in the opinions of modern scholars. Pritchard praises it as “one of Frost’s grimmer poems” not so much because of its subject as much as “the way its narrator provides no guiding tone of response—tragic or otherwise—to the event.” Jeffrey Meyers, in his book Robert Frost: A Biography, calls “Out, Out—” “one of his greatest poems” but feels that its ending is not a figurative depiction of resuming one’s life after tragedy; instead, he calls it a “bitter comment on the callous indifference to human suffering.” Finally, in his book Robert Frost: A Life, Jay Parini calls “Out, Out—” one of Frost’s “most affecting poems” because he “allows the poem to open into a complex and suggestive ambiguity” and “leaves a good deal of interpretive work for the reader to accomplish.”

Criticism

Daniel Moran

Daniel Moran is a secondary-school teacher of English and American Literature. He has contributed several entries and essays to the Gale series Drama for Students. In the following essay, Moran examines the ways in which “Out, Out—” dramatizes, in an American setting, the ideas of the Shakespearean passage from which Frost took his poem’s title.

The title of Frost’s poem is an allusion to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the tragedy of a man who—prompted by his insatiable ambition—murders his king and several others who threaten his tenuous rule. Near the end of the play, Macbeth learns from a servant that the queen, his wife, is dead. After all of his scheming and surrendering to the most base and evil parts of his own nature, this news prompts Macbeth to utter one of Shakespeare’s most sobering and pessimistic soliloquies:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusky death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale,
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

The death of his wife suggests to Macbeth the ultimate meaninglessness of his ambition and the folly of all ambition everywhere. Experience teaches us nothing, since the past only lights “fools / The way to dusky death.” And although time seems to crawl for the duration of one’s life, that same life can be snuffed out in an instant, as the flame of a candle burns brightly for hours but is extinguished in a second. This paradox causes Macbeth to ruminate on the meaningless of all human endeavor: ultimately, despite its “sound and fury,” human life signifies “nothing.” She “should have died hereafter”—in her old age—but has instead died now and reduced all of their ambition to dust.

The achievement of Frost’s “Out, Out—” is that he replicates not the situation of Shakespeare’s play, but the feeling of Macbeth when he learns about the death of his wife. Using his trademark locale (rural New England), Frost dramatizes Macbeth’s manifesto of hopelessness in a distinctly American setting to explore the ways in which the thoughts of a defeated and solitary Scottish king are equally at home in a story of a Vermont boy who dies from a bizarre accident. While completing this difficult task, Frost also explores the way in which an innocent boy steps into the world of experience and adulthood, only to find that this world is a cruel and unjust place.

The poem begins with the saw having, literally, the first word—as it will figuratively have the last:

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of
      wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.

This saw is no mindless tool; instead, it attacks the wood like a pit bull, snarling and rattling as the boy feeds it. This hint of malice, however, is downplayed in these lines, since the saw is in the service of the family (making wood for their stove) and the sticks it creates are “sweet-scented stuff”; the alliteration adds to the “sweetness” of the wood (for the repeated s is sweet-sounding) and a word like “stuff” belongs in the mouth of a rustic observer, rather than a Shakespearean king.

The poem’s setting also serves to downplay the initial ferocious sounds of the saw: “Five mountain ranges, one behind the other / Under the sunset far into Vermont” are not a besieged Scottish castle, but generic elements of an American pastoral. Still, the saw continues its steady barking:

And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and
      rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.

The boy—the saw’s master, in a sense—decides how hard the saw will work, and the saw keeps at its work. The repetition of “snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,” however, hints to the reader that everything can change—like Macbeth’s marriage—in an instant. The mountain ranges are a beautiful sight, but the snarling of the saw adds a touch of menace.

The speaker’s regret about the events he is about to describe colors his descriptions of what he wishes had happened moments before the accident:

Call it a day, I wish they might have said
o please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.

These lines emphasize the boy’s innocence: although he was using a buzz saw (a dangerous piece of “adult” machinery), he was, the speaker stresses, still a boy. “Call it a day” is a phrase used by adults to tell other adults to stop working; all the boy (any boy) really wants is another half hour in which to play. Later, the boy is described as a “big boy / Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart,” and the above passage underscores the boy’s youth to make his eventual death more shocking and inexplicable. (Note that the boy’s sister is also a child playfully pretending to belong to the world of adults, announcing “Supper” in her apron). While kids pretending

“Using his trademark locale (rural New England), Frost dramatizes Macbeth’s manifesto of hopelessness in a distinctly American setting to explore the ways in which the thoughts of a defeated and solitary Scottish king are equally at home in a story of a Vermont boy who dies from a bizarre accident.”

to be adults (by doing adult chores or wearing adult clothes, for example) are often viewed as cute, this boy’s dabbling with adulthood proves deadly because adults die more often than children as part of the natural order of things.

When the accident occurs, the speaker cannot rationalize or even describe it in definitive terms. Frost replicates this observer’s struggle to put the accident in a logical sequence of cause-and-effect:

At the word, the saw,
As if to prove it knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!

The speaker can only offer an explanation of the accident based on the premise that the saw gained a moment of sentience and attacked the boy—but the speaker also knows that this is impossible, so he qualifies his explanation with “or seemed to leap” before admitting, “He must have given the hand” and that “Neither refused the meeting.” The speaker is, in effect, doing with his description of the accident what humans often do when faced with an inexplicable event or an unexpected death: trying to find a reason, a cause, for what has occurred. The poem as a whole, however, suggests that for something like this accident there is no reason. All a person can say is, “But the hand!”—all an observer can do is proclaim his own shock. Thus, the initial personification of the saw

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 not offering (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 devoured by the adult world.
Naturally, a reader of “Out, Out—” will find a reading of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (c. 1606) useful in understanding the forces that prompt Macbeth to make the statement Frost uses as the title 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.

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 frantic 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 attitude toward his subject—for what can an observer say about the boy’s pleadings? “He pleaded well?” “His cries made me feel sorry for him?” Perhaps— but ultimately, all that one can say 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 earlier 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 father to

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light!

—but Frost’s mission here is to replicate the lack of 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 upturned 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 sentence) 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 realize 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 endorsement of this attitude—that the world is a place where random events sometimes destroy the innocent 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 his affairs 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 acceptance 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 students at the Bread Loaf School of English. In this essay, Wiles explores the tension between the pastoral 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 breathtaking 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 England 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 people 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, common 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 intruded on the idyllic rural scene. But, even here, the day’s labor is coming to an end; the boy’s sister calls “them” (suggesting others besides the boy are doing necessary chores) to the evening meal. It

“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.”

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 transitional lines: “… the saw / … / Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—” Jay Parini in Robert Frost: A Life states that “perhaps the saw was animate and malicious.” Also, Parini suggests that Frost has made the world of technology “ominous, even rapacious,” a reaction against the industrialization 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. Livestock 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 influenza, 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 in Robert Frost: The Poet and His Critics mentions the observations of Radcliffe Squires from The Major 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 accident that piques the reader’s interest. Parini describes 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 ruined (“spoiled”). There is little room for a boy who cannot “pull his weight” in the subsistence economy 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 appears 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 contribute; 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 exhibits 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 Bible and Shakespeare’s Macbeth inform the reading of this poem, emphasizing its more serious and darker tones.

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 inauguration of John F. Kennedy. When Frost died, Kennedy said: “His death impoverishes us all; but he has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable 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 Macbeth can immediately 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 instrument of betrayal, and thus the poem’s first line subtly introduces the idea of callousness toward humans’ 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 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 …”

“The buzz saw snarled and rattled” uses the “s” and “r” sounds of a saw cutting wood, and shaving 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 “mountain” 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, tempered 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 instead of the respite for which the boy might so appreciate. Here is where the speaker shows an understanding 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 this 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 sacrifice 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 parallels the confusion of the characters in the poem. The jagged grammar mimics that confusion, particularly 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 inevitable. And then the speaker explains:

So. But the hand was gone already.

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:

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 after a death. The only ones who truly stop are the dead themselves. Frost may have realized that despite 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 Mifflin 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, featuring all of his individual books of poetry plus ninety-four uncollected poems (seventeen published for the first time). The volume also contains a generous sampling 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, having been praised by numerous critics for its readability and insight into an often misrepresented figure.

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.

Poetry for Students