A Cold Frost?

Robert Frost was not a personable man. We know this from biography, and it radiates from his poems. The grade school image of the nature loving, road less traveling poet that we have all been force fed gets turned inside out upon a mature examination of his work. This is a good thing. It makes Frost a rounded human being. It makes us re-read and re-think. We get to see his dark side, which has been lurking in many of his poems; right under our birch swinging, apple picking, woods stopping noses. Once we as readers are finally tuned in to this aspect of Frost's work however, we run the risk of seeking it everywhere, in every poem. Sometimes we are so focused on feeling our way through the dark room of the poem, that we don't see the sunlight blazing through the open window. I think "Out, Out--" is one of those poems that we want to be dark, when in reality it is, well just reality.

Certainly, this isn't a happy poem. While cutting wood with a buzz-saw, a boy accidentally cuts his hand off, and then dies as a result of his injury. Downbeat? Yes. Dark? I think not. One must keep in mind certain facts when reading this poem

1. This was a farm in the early 1900s. Every person in the family worked the farm. Their entire existence depended on the farm. If it didn't continue to run successfully, they didn't eat, let alone pay bills.
2. Frost titles this poem in reference to a passage from Shakespeare's Macbeth. It's Act V Scene V, lines 17-28. I'm not quoting it, and shame on you if you don't have a copy of Shakespeare's complete works in your collection. I will paraphrase though. Life is short, full of fuss and turmoil, and ultimately meaningless.

Now that we are caught up, we can tackle the last two lines of this poem. A lot of readers are offended at how callous the family of this boy are. How can they just go back to work after such a tragedy? Because they have to. Because if they shut their lives down and spend a day, two days, a week grieving, then the farm suffers and they jeopardize their existence. They are now short one person, and his work has to be absorbed by the other members of the family.

I will go as far as saying that the boy let himself die. He did not cut his own hand off. He technically did not commit suicide. Once he knew his hand was gone; once "He saw all spoiled" (line25), he knew he was of no value to the farm any more. So he mentally and physically stopped fighting against his injury - he allowed himself to die so that he would not be a burden to the operation; he would not be a non-contributing mouth to feed. I see the boy as a self-sacrificing hero.

I love the impersonal nature of this poem. The boy, the sister, the doctor, the watcher, "those that lifted eyes" (line 4), and "they" (the family) are never assigned names. The most personified thing in the poem is the buzz-saw with its snarling and rattling. Upon hearing that supper was ready the saw was also hungry, and it was not shy about what it wanted to eat.

Back to our Shakespeare reference: the boy represents the brevity of life, "brief candle." The saw represents the "sound and fury." His death was meaningless, "signifying nothing."