‘Out, Out’ by Robert Frost is a poem of a young boy cutting
some wood on his buzz saw, to eventually cutting his hand off in the process.
It has a nice tone throughout the poem until the end when everything takes a
shift to an almost dark sense. The poem itself has an overall theme that life
is short and can be lost in the blink of an eye, or in the mishap of a table
saw.
The speaker throughout the poem has a moderate tone that is
in an almost a callous sense. He starts off describing the scenery around him,
talking about the buzz saw as though it is an animate object. It “snarls and
rattles” almost as if it is controlling itself throughout these first couple
lines. It goes on to tell us of the imagery of mountains and the sun setting
into Vermont. He then goes on to tell the story of a boy cutting some wood as
is his job. The poem starts to say that it is just an ordinary day and that the
boy is about to call it a day. As his sister comes to call out to him that
supper is ready, is when the saw seems to take a leap of its own, as if it had
its own mind, and jumps out to cut the boys hand. The boy doesn't want his
sister to call the doctor but she called him anyway, as he was losing too much
blood. He then gets put under with ether and that is when the boy passes away.
It is here where the tone of the
poem just changes, makes a drastic shift.
“No more to
build on there. And they, since they
Were not the
one dead, turned to their affairs.”
It is almost
as if no one cares that this boy just passed away, no one has any care in the world
at all that a young child is gone. Just because it is not them who passed away
they don’t seem to want to give any attention to it. The death doesn't stop
anything for this town, besides the work that the boy is doing. No grieving was
done just a whole lot of moving on. The speakers view on everything changes
with these lines, originally going from a normal tone to just a complete change
to blunt ending within the last couple of lines. It is most likely a reference
to seeing bodies in a battlefield and how you just have to watch them go down
and do nothing about it.
