1/12/2022 blog

On Robert Frost’s “Out, Out–”

This poem appeals to me now because it is about a mutilation and ultimately a death, while I am now writing a work of fiction that includes a mutilation scene though the context, cause, and outcome are much different.

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

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

To please the boy by giving him the half hour

That a boy counts so much when saved from work.

His sister stood beside him in her apron

To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,

As if to prove saws 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 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, big boy

Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—

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.

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.

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.”

From poemanalysis.com

“The poem was first published in July of 1916 in McClure’s. It was later included in his collection, Mountain Interval, published that same year. ‘Out, Out—‘ was inspired by the true story of a young boy, Raymon Tracy Fitzgerald, who died in an accident at a young age. It is generally thought that the title is an allusion to the famous line in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ‘Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player.’”

The poem is gruesome but fits with the violence in the climax of the novella I am trying to complete now. We listened to a recording of the poem in an art class my first year of high school, so it also resonates.