F: Robert Frost

Out-, Out-

Just like Eliot last week, there was only one dead poet on my shelves to choose from here. My own relationship with Frost is that I often forget how good he is. For whatever reason, he rarely springs to mind for me when I’m listing poets whose work I like, but whenever I turn my attention back to him, I’m reminded of how many of his poems I feel connected to. Oh yeah, he did that one…and that one…and that one. There’s something of Blake about him: although I don’t think anyone’s really as incredible as Blake, Frost is still one of those handful of poets whose surface simplicity of language belies an almost alchemical depth of idea and emotion. There’s definitely a Frost ‘voice’ and it’s an extremely welcoming one – there’s a kind of naivety to it that is charming rather than facile.

This one is maybe a slightly less well-known one (I’m not sure, I know his reputation in the US is huge so maybe this one *is* well-known there) – what I mean to say is that it’s not Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening, or Fire and Ice, or Nothing Gold Can Stay, or Acquainted With The Night.

You can read it here: ‘Out, Out—’ | The Poetry Foundation

‘Out, Out—’

You’ve got my attention already, Frost, with your Macbeth reference. Macbeth’s instant grief after learning of the death of his wife, ‘Out, out, brief candle!’ But maybe also a hint of ‘Out, damn’d spot’ as well; Lady Macbeth washing her hands. So there’s going to be blood here. And guilt. And somebody left over, trying to make sense of death.

And the line is cut off. Huh.

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.

As a first line, I think you’d struggle to find a clearer red flag than this buzz saw. Chekhov’s gun. The ‘snarled and rattled” is already personifying it into a wild and dangerous thing. But at the moment it’s ok. It makes useful things – ‘stove-length sticks’ and even pleasant things - ‘sweet-scented’ dust.

What’s Frost doing with that Vermont sunset mountain view? Why is that in there? It’s part of the build up of tension. That buzz saw is the one violent thing in a world where everything else is picture-postcard nice. We know that buzz saw is going to do something bad, but the immediate establishment of a setting incongruous to the promised violence jars us and forces to wait for the blow that we know is coming. Also – perhaps this is not about the mountains or the view at all – look at “those that lifted eyes”. We’ve got a rural workplace here, but why do the people have downcast eyes? Maybe they’re just busy doing their own thing, but we can’t help but see it as foreshadowing of the solemnity that’s coming.

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.

Stop looking at the sunset and the mountains, anyway. Back to that buzz saw. Just the same two verbs as before, repeated twice again here. It’s relentless and wild. Look at it!

But…nothing happened. More tension. We know what you’re doing, Frost.

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.

Ah. Oh no.

I like the way this is managed. “I wish they might have said” is really nice, because it consciously pushes the narrative voice into the present where the regrettable thing that’s *going* to happen has, indeed, already happened. It’s confirmation, as if we needed it, that we were right to worry about the saw. The whole opening to this poem is playing with narrative and time and expectations.

And what, most of all, does this speaker now, with hindsight, want to give to the boy? More time. Uh-oh.

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!

As with the mountains before, why does Frost land upon the seemingly irrelevant observational detail of the sister’s apron? Well, that specificity means that the boy is not just ‘a’ boy. Now he’s a specific boy who is loved, with a family who made him dinner. Now the poem is not just a narrative game teasing us over who is going to get sawed (sawn?) – now we care.

That “as if to prove saws knew what supper meant” is brutal, isn’t it? The boy is its supper.

It’s also interesting that there’s a kind of detachment when the violence of the moment does arrive. The speaker of the poem doesn’t even mention the blood or the pain, or even the wildness of the saw anymore. There’s just a strange musing, almost finicky – is the saw alive, and it jumped up to the boy’s hand? No, the boy must have put his hand on it. And then “However it was…” – what is this speaker *doing*? He can’t decide whether the saw that he fancifully personified earlier actually *is* a sentient being, and he doesn’t even come to a conclusion on it. He describes the moment as a ‘meeting’, which links us back to the idea of the inevitability of this moment that the start of the poem led us to. Meanwhile, the hand. Oh yeah, that. Almost an afterthought.

I think that detachment is probably a realistic way to render the experience of witnessing violence of this random, pointless type. Nothing was supposed to be happening! Dinner was ready! How can we possibly transition from that banal moment into one that contains a mutilated boy?

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 boy has the same problem as the witnesses. His “rueful laugh” of disbelief, his confusion in ‘holding up’ his own hand. His world has transformed – “all spoiled”. There’s still no dwelling on the gory violence of the incident, that word “spilling” being the only passing reference to blood, cushioned by the metaphor instead, of “life” spilling, which is less gory but more upsetting.

Frost is really good at these really poignant little moments, and the ones here are especially sad coming within that moment of realisation the boy has: “big boy…child at heart”. He turns to his sister to plead with her: that loved one we noticed earlier, who is now powerless to help.

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.

Look at these short declarations here. The description of the boy’s death is again quiet and managed undramatically. The detachment is still there but I think we begin to feel that detachment hardening in the management of this speaker’s voice, lest it become panic. It now almost feels like a deliberate looking away, which again, I suppose, is a natural response. The speaker has retreated into the role of recorder and observer.

“Little-less-nothing!” is the death. Are we going back to Macbeth’s speech referenced in the title with that significant word ‘nothing’? Life’s but a walking shadow…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But if that’s true, that it’s a pointless moment signifying nothing, what are we saying about this incident? Why write about it?

No more to build on there. And they, since they

Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

I think these last two lines are genius. A gut-punch. Definitely the ‘signifying nothing’ life-lesson of the nihilistic Scottish king. “Since they/were not the one dead”. Wow. Again, brutal. What does it mean, to ‘turn to one’s affairs’ after an incident like this?

But then again, what *can* an incident like this mean? It’s senseless, it’s banal, it’s nobody’s fault. There’s no drama or conflict with this violence – it was only a ‘meeting’ with the saw, remember.

So we’re going back to the state of affairs established at the beginning of the poem. It’s an ordinary day. Nothing is happening. We are not the one dead, so we go back to our affairs. It reminds me of the El-Kurd poem from last week about how easily we ignore atrocity – this is a small version of the same impulse. In a less urgent way, it also reminds me of one of my favourite poems, Musee Des Beaux Arts, by Auden, written 20 years or so after this one, about the way the ploughmen ignore the fall of Icarus in a Brueghel painting - about the strange relationship we have with death when it doesn’t feel close enough to us.

Is it too much of a reach to suggest there’s something contextual going on here too? It seems a weird move to set up a poem about the death of a child where the subject is the insignificance of that. But this poem was written in 1916. Can we read it as a comment on the senselessness of the war machine in Europe that was slaughtering a whole generation of boys who’d been asked to do the work of men?

Here’s the poem again uninterrupted: ‘Out, Out—’ | The Poetry Foundation

In the comments:

Is this an anti-war poem or is that a leap?

How does Frost achieve so much poetry with so little fanciness or surface complexity?