Robert Frost’s out out

AMER MAHMOOD YOUSAF

GOVT. ISLAMIA COLLEGE CIVIL LINES LAHORE.

The sound and fury signified here is also reflected in the pandemonium created by the buzz-saw. 

• "Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."

The poem "Out, Out-" by Robert Frost was first published in 1916 in The Mountain Interval .

• No passage in English literature, except perhaps Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, is as famous as the 12 lines uttered by Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death.

• The repeated command is directed to “brief candle,” an apt symbol of human life. The brevity of life makes man’s struggles and aspirations meaningless. Macbeth in the numbness of profound grief expounds that emotion with understatement infinitely more poignant than weeping, wailing and rage.

The poem is "apparently based on a true story of a boy's death whilst working in New England.

• Frost’s two-word title for his 34-line poem about the accidental death of an ordinary Vermont boy imports all of the drama of Shakespeare’s tragedy of a heroic Scottish tyrant faced with the realization that life is “a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.”

The poem is also a statement on the war in England and Child Labour that had children attaining manhood before they even reached it. 

• Frost’s poem begins with vivid imagery of sound, sight and smell. The onomatopoeia of line one: “The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard” is redoubled in line seven: “And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled.” The verbs give the power tool animalistic life. “Snarled” evokes angry dogs, wolves, and other quadruped beasts. “Rattled” imports the sound of a snake giving warning that it is about to strike with venomous fangs. Both words resonate with sound and fury.

The title has been taken from Macbeth's soliloquy in which he ruminates over the death of his wife. 

• We picture the falling sawdust, the stove-length sticks, the five mountain ranges and a Vermont sunset. Images of smell come with “Sweet-scented stuff” wafted by a breeze.

• The workaday ordinariness of the scene is reinforced by the empty understatement of line nine. “And nothing happened: day was all but done.

The immaterial nihilism that the material life arrives at is signified by the word 'nothing'.

•  Line ten commences with the trite imperative for cessation of labor, “Call it a day.” Then the speaker asserts him

• self with the regretful comment, “I wish they might have said.”

• The poet/speaker subtly foreshadows coming fatality with his verb selection in “saved from work.”

 Critics have seen the same as an expression of New England Calvinist philosophy that was prevalent during the times. 

• The central character’s apron-wearing sister comes “to tell them ‘Supper’.”

• The saw, earlier invested (not quite personified) with bestial animation, leaps at its evening meal. To diffuse that fanciful notion, the speaker adds, “or seemed to leap-/He must have given the hand.”

•  tinged with cruel irony. To give one’s hand suggests a greeting or friendly handshake. “Neither refused the meeting,” but don’t get friendly with a spinning saw blade.

As, the saying goes, experience is the greatest Teacher. And one of the lessons learnt was that Death is inevitable.The phrase "Little--less--nothing!" points to the ultimate destination of Life: Nihilism.

• the boy’s first utterance is “a rueful laugh.” He holds up the hand “as if to keep/ The life from spilling.” (Textbooks commonly quote the latter phrase as an example of metonymy: a figure of speech in which something closely related life is used for what is actually meant – blood.)

• The boy would lose his hand. But more tragically unexplainable is that while under the doctor’s anesthesia, the boy dies apparently of shock.

The buzz-saw underlines the boy's mechanical routine.

•  Like Lady Macbeth, he “should have died hereafter./ There would have been a time for such a word.” It makes no sense for it to happen now. It is a death signifying nothing.

• Frost seems flippant in his concluding lines. “No more to build on there.” At first the phrase seems a wry and callous reference to jobs of construction in which power saws are important. But perhaps the speaker is referring to the life, which is snuffed like an extinguished candle: the boy’s heartbeat or pulse that faded “Little less nothing.” Nothing can be built on nothing.

• . . . . And they, since they/ Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

• The living have lives to lead, things to build on. Macbeth also turned to his pressing affairs, heroically affirming his selfhood, knowing full well there was nothing to build on, acting his part in “a tale told by an idiot.”

SYMBOLS

• The juxtaposition of the buzz-saw against the tranquil nature highlights the conflict between science and nature;culture and nature where a boy is forced to relegate his childhood that goes against Nature.

• The sister wearing an apron signifies the same.• The handicap of the boy emblematizes the handicap of

civilization that is incomplete in spite of the professed leaps made by technology.

• The 'half-hour' break symbolizes the condensation of his childhood.

In this sense, his method is like Brecht's alienation technique.

• The poem is penned in blank verse with deviations from iambic pentameter.

• The poet utilizes onomatopoeia,assonance and alliteration.• Frost employs imagery that assists in the narrative mode of story-telling.• He adopts objectivity in tone and succeeds in stimulating the readers

rather than emotionally draining them.• In "Out,Out-" , Robert Frost makes use of a contrarian style.• For instance,though the poem about Life,it uses a machine to make a

statement on the same.• Though the poet utilizes meiosis(understatement),the subtle treatment

leaves a lasting impression on the readers' mind. • Though the poet denotes,he connotes more.