Out, Out— by Robert Frost

First published: 1916, in Mountain Interval

Type of poem: Narrative

The Poem

Robert Frost’s “‘Out, Out—’” describes a farm accident that unexpectedly and irrationally costs a young boy his life. The narrator of the poem sets the scene, seemingly from an outsider’s perspective, reporting the incident with objectivity and restraint. Yet, as the narrative advances, underlying emotions and tensions surface as the persona builds to the poem’s conclusion: the seemingly senseless, abrupt ending of the boy’s life, followed by his family’s subsequent return to their daily routines.

The first nine lines of the poem set the scene: the “snarl” of the saw and the “sweet-scented” smell of the wood as it is cut into “stove-length sticks.” Beyond the farm, the late afternoon sun settles over “five mountain ranges” extending “far into Vermont.” It has been an ordinary day on an ordinary farm, despite the exceptional beauty of its location: “And nothing happened: day was all but done.” This section concludes with its foreboding note, its hint not just of nature’s majesty but also its fearful possibilities for disrupting everyday life.

In the next nine lines of the poem, both the narrator and the boy sawing the wood are introduced. So, too, is the narrator’s discomfort with the story he has to tell. The persona “wish[es]” that the boy’s family had given him “the half hour” he craved to be a boy after a full day of work. Instead, the boy has toiled until his sister announces “Supper”—the very moment when the accident occurs. The narrator is unsure just how the boy’s hand comes to be severed: whether the saw heard the word “supper,” too, and “leaped out,” or the boy did so, or both.

In the aftermath of the accident (the following eleven lines), the boy gives a “rueful laugh” as he “hold[s] up the hand,” beseeching help in disbelief, while at the same time trying to prevent his own “life from spilling.” Yet it is too late, as the boy suddenly realizes: “Then the boy saw all”; “He saw all spoiled.” Being old enough to understand the adult world and do adult work, “though a child at heart,” the boy knows how little value his life will have when he is missing a hand. What kind of farm work will he do? Of what use will he be? He begs, “‘Don’t let [the doctor] cut my hand off,’” but it is too late. His hand cannot be saved, and unexpectedly, it appears, neither can the boy himself: “And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.”

In the last four lines of the poem, readers are given the family’s reaction—first shock; then a realistic acceptance of death, “that ended it”; and, finally, a seeming callousness: “And they, since they/ Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” Life on the farm must go on. Now that the boy is dead, there is “No more to build on there”; they return to their daily chores, building what they can and living their own lives. There seems nothing more to be said or done, and the poem concludes abruptly.

Forms and Devices

“‘Out, Out—’” is one of Frost’s mid-length narrative poems, written in blank verse to convey natural speech rhythms. The poet uses simple, everyday language, words such as “supper,” “buzz saw,” “apron,” and “big boy.” However, the natural flow is broken by hard caesuras (abrupt breaks) in almost half the lines; these increase in number toward the end of the poem, where they occur often early in a line, rather than in the middle where a pause is more natural (for example, in line 27: “So. But the hand was gone already.”). These breaks betray the emotionality underlying the narrator’s restrained reporting style, as do the three exclamation points dotting the poem. The hard caesura interruptions also correspond to the accident’s abrupt break in the day-to-day rhythms of farm routine and the boy’s foreshortened life.

Frost immerses the reader in the scene of the poem by drawing on all the senses. He creates the sound of the “buzz saw” through the refrain of strong action verbs, “snarled and rattled,” repeated three times in the first seven lines, and by using s, t, d, and z sounds early in the poem. He also re-creates for readers the “sweet-scented” smell of the shavings from the cut wood and the majestic view, as the sun sets over the five Vermont mountains that dwarf the farm below.

The narrator gives readers more than simple, realistic detail, however. Imaginative, fanciful commentary intrudes on the reporter’s objectivity. The saw, personified through the words “As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,” suddenly comes to life; it “seemed to leap” at the boy’s hand. Here the speaker suggests the possibility of an inanimate object’s becoming animate, of the tool’s possibly human, and certainly unpredictable and destructive, qualities. The narrator’s imagination allows for the possibility of such supernatural happenings, as it also enables him to empathize with the boy.

The speaker understands how reluctant the boy has been to take on adult responsibilities when he would rather have been playing. “I wish,” the narrator admits, the boy’s family might have been more sympathetic and allowed him to quit work earlier. Instead, it is the narrator who realizes the boy is still “a child at heart,” not “they,” his family, who should have been more understanding of his needs. Thus, tension is created between the narrator/outsider who reports the accident and the family insiders who turn away from it, despite their part in its occurrence.

The title underscores this narrative tension. It is taken from Macbeth’s soliloquy at the end of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (pr. 1606), when his words “Out, out, brief candle!” express profound grief over the abrupt death by suicide of Lady Macbeth. Such an overt expression of grief is missing here on the part of the boy’s family, however, though not on the part of the poet who has made Macbeth’s anguished cry his title. The words also suggest Lady Macbeth’s torment before her suicide, “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” as she vainly tries to wash away the blood of murder from her hands. So, too, as the boy’s relatives turn away to resume their chores, they may find themselves unable to wash his blood from their hands. They may only appear to have washed away their sense of responsibility (however unintentional) for his death and their grief over his loss through their traditional New England stoicism and reticence.

Bibliography

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Galbraith, Astrid. New England as Poetic Landscape: Henry David Thoreau and Robert Frost. New York: Peter Lang, 2003.

Gerber, Philip L. Robert Frost. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

Lathem, Edward Connery. Robert Frost: A Biography. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981.

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Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Potter, James L. The Robert Frost Handbook. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980.

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Thompson, Lawrance Roger, and R. H. Winnick. Robert Frost: A Biography. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982.