Robert Frost’s poem “Out, Out –“ is about a boy who has his arm sawed off during work and asks his sister not to let the doctor amputate his arm, he then realizes he’s lost too much blood and then dies while doctors try to save him. After his death everyone else continues on with their work and lives. Frost uses a lot of end-stopped lines, enjambment, repetition and personification among others in his lines of poetry.
Frost uses a lot of end-stopped lines and enjambment in the lines of his poem. Both have an effect on the way the poem is read by the readers. The lines which use end-stops can be found throughout the beginnings of the poem.
“And from there those that lifted eyes could count/ Five mountain ranges one behind the other/ Under the sunset far into Vermont.”
The end-stopping of the lines flow with how the reader would naturally say the lines, making the pauses at the end that we would normally read or speak it as also slowing down the pace of the poem. The description of the setting creates a quiet and peaceful atmosphere and is beautifully portrayed, in contrast to the work going on around. When the work and accident of the boy begin Frost adds more enjambments.
When the interaction between the boy and saw begin Frost uses enjambments which creates a quick pace, opposite of the end-stopped lines. This creates a more animated dialogue with the reader. Where the end-stops are read smoothly, the enjambments give the lines momentum as the readers are taken through the accident.
“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!”
“Half in appeal, but half as if to keep/ The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all –/ Since...
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...e readers can feel like they are in the moment, placing themselves in the setting and time period and feel the fear of the boy as he lays dying. He’s old enough to work in the mills but not old enough to die because of them. Frost wrote the last lines of the poem well, describing the dying and as the boy does die his words become more detached. He used “So” and “No more to build on there.”, once the boy died Frost had no words to eloquently describe the boy’s death because there was no beautiful way or meaning behind the death of a child and Frost was aware of that. As the boy dies the people are in disbelief but as the last line says “Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” Frost knew the sadness of the boy’s death and his innocence but, he also wrote of how life continues no matter how cold hearted and unfeeling it appears in the face of this death.
Robert Frost wrote many poems; however, one of his most popular themes involved isolation. The poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words,” Robert Frost once said. As is made fairly obvious by this quote, Frost was an adroit thinker. It seems like he spent much of his life thinking about the little things. He often pondered the meaning and symbolism of things he found in nature. Many readers find Robert Frost’s poems to be straightforward, yet his work contains deeper layers of complexity beneath the surface. His poems are not what they seem to be at first glance. These deeper layers of complexity can be clearly seen in his poems “The Road Not Taken”, “Fire and Ice”, and “Birches”.
In the two Robert Frost poems, "Mowing" and "Acquainted with the Night," he uses insightful figurative language and diction to describe the pleasurable feeling of labor through hard work; he compares it to the isolation of being all alone from the rest of the world. In the poem, "Mowing," Frost uses alliteration and descriptive imagery to form the main message that the reality of hard work is rewarding enough. Although his poem uses the standard 14 line structure of a sonnet, he uses a mixed sonnet structure, combining the Shakespearian and Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet structures to create a whole new and different rhyme scheme. Frost uses a "long scythe" to demonstrate that working in the world, while embracing
Frost is far more than the simple agrarian writer some claim him to be. He is deceptively simple at first glance, writing poetry that is easy to understand on an immediate, superficial level. Closer examination of his texts, however, reveal his thoughts on deeply troubling psychological states of living in a modern world. As bombs exploded and bodies piled up in the World Wars, people were forced to consider not only death, but the aspects of human nature that could allow such atrocities to occur. By using natural themes and images to present modernist concerns, Frost creates poetry that both soothes his readers and asks them to consider the true nature of the world and themselves.
...to be. The characters of which Frost’s poems are about paint clear pictures of what he anticipates that the readers will get out of the poems. The characters could be nature, animals, or people that are used as symbols. The poems are always understandable, even if there is not a clear plot within the poem.
Frost begins the poem by describing a young boy cutting some wood using a "buzz-saw." The setting is Vermont and the time is late afternoon. The sun is setting and the boy's sister calls he and the other workers to come for "Supper." As the boy hears its dinnertime, he gets excited and cuts his hand on accident. Immediately realizing that the doctor might amputate his hand, he asks his sister to make sure that it does not happen. By the time the doctor arrives, it is too late and the boy's hand is already lost. When the doctor gives him anaesthetic, he falls asleep and never wakes up again. The last sentence of the poem, "since they (the boys family and the doctor) were not the one dead, turned to their affairs" shows how although the boys death is tragic, people move on with their life in a way conveying the idea that people only care for themselves.
The first technique he uses is imagery. Frost does this at the beginning of the poem by talking about all of the beauty of nature that is around the boy. For example, he talks about the mountains in the distance that the boy does not see because he is too busy working. Another example and the most important use of imagery in this poem is the snarling and rattling of the saw. This is essential because it gives the readers a since of life to the saw. Lastly, the sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it gives the reader not only smell but also touch. All of these examples of imagery helps set the mood for the reader and puts them into the poem as an onlooker. Another technique that he uses is figurative language. The saw “snarled and rattled” is the use of figurative language and onomatopoeia because it represents the fate of the boy and the animal-like noise that accompanies the fate. Also, “Call it a day” is figurative language because this represents that if the boy was told to stop working earlier he might have never lost his and hand and would not have died. Frost also uses figurative language when he wrote “The life from spilling” meaning that literally the blood is gushing from his arm and so his life is quickly fading away because the more blood loss the faster arrival of death will come. Irony can also be found in “Out, out” when the boy laughs after his hand is cut off by the saw. This ironic because usually people do not laugh at these types of situations and have the complete opposite reaction which is usually panic. Frost also uses blank verse and no stanzas to convey emotion throughout the poem. He does this by showing the light heartedness of the setting at the beginning of the poem and is invested in the boy, but then as the poem continues he detaches himself from the emotional aspect of the situation the boy is in. For example, when is says, “Call it a day , I
The poem’s diction is fairly simple so that educated and uneducated people alike would be able to read and understand the poem somewhat easily. Because Frost prided himself upon being accessible and relatable to all people,
Entering the dark of ether, the little boy dies as “his pulse took fright.” Incomplete, much like the little boy’s life, Frost uses the fragment “No more to build on there” and “Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs” as a way to emphasize the little meaning that is associated with the boy’s life before and after death. This senseless irrelevance, the basis of this poem, is where the name, an allusion, is derived from. This allusion to Shakespeare’s Macbeth: "Out, out, brief candle!
In the opening stanza, Frost describes coming to a point during a walk along a rural road that diverges into two separate, yet similar paths. The narrator finds that he ...
“to please his meg”, his dream girl and yet, as he comes to acknowledge that it was all too good to be true, he realizes he has committed himself to a false illusion . It also depicts the dramatic transition of his life “before” and “after”. On the contrary, pitifulness in “Out, out” is reinforced by the living conditions the boy has to live with along with the melancholic image and the fact that the boy has lived and experienced such a harsh life at such a young age. In addition, both poems have similar tragic messages. In “Out, out” the “boy is young at heart” whose hand is cut off with the buzz
“No more to build …” Robert Frost’s poem, “`Out, Out—',” tells of a young boy’s life, quickly, taken away in a gruesome matter. As the poem is delivered in first person, the speaker refers to the characters in third person—reminiscing this tragedy as a personal viewed memory—describing the boy’s loss of his hand with cruel diction: illuminating to his pain, despite his, “first outcry was a rueful laugh” (19). Frost conveys the readers into the scene by engaging the senses: to see all as, “the life [spilled]/[and] they listened at his heart” (22-31) as an interruption for personal reactions. This emotional poem centers the conflict on the fragility of life, and the theme of the poem, the inescapable presence of death, with graphic content,
This poem is darker than most of Frost’s poems. One of the most depressing lines that are in this poem is, “Now if it was dusk outside Inside it was dark,” (Frost, Lines 3 to 4). From this line, the reader could take that even though there is some happiness outside, all Frost feels on the inside is sadness. It comes up in the poem that it is easier to feel sad than to be happy. In the middle stanza of the poem is when Frost’s positivity starts to reveal itself. He states, “The last of the light of the sun That had died in the west Still lived for one song more In a thrush’s breast.” (Frost, lines 9 to 12). From this statement, it can be gathered from the light that had died still living on. Even though it can’t be seen, Frost still knows that it is there. This is a main focus point of the poem. Having been sad for so long, it is a nice feeling to be happy. Frost is holding on to the feeling of it because he so desperately wants to be happy. This stanza gives a glimpse of hope to the readers, and that is the focus point of Come In, the poem written by Robert
The speaker knows he can not stay in this "paradise".(14) The speaker does not want to leave this spot, but he has made other promises that he has to keep. (14) I believe Frost uses repetition of the last two lines of this poem (and miles to go before I sleep) to emphasize the importance of this promise he has made, and to support the speakers reasons for having to leave. (15-16)I am not a big fan of poetry, but this poem caught my eye because I am a fan of nature. Frost and I would have had a lot in common, his poetry reflects many of my own personal views of nature.
Frost uses nature as a reflection of human experiences; just like humanity it can have seasons and life cycles. He uses different scenes to depict a certain mood for readers to step into the psychological happening of a man. The idea of how seasons change, Frost compares it through the life cycles that humans encounter. Contrary to popular opinion, I believe that nature is not Frost’s central theme in his poetry; it is about the relationship that man has with nature in which can be seen from “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, “The Road Not Taken”, and “An Old Man’s Winter Night.”