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.
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 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.
للأمانة منقول
من
Out Out – Robert Frost – مدونة الجمعية العلمية للغات و التر
أتمنى يكون المطلوب
بعدين أنا ما نسيتك من موضوع ابحوث
لكن قاعد أدور
تحياتي
قويه صح؟
