Analysis Of Out, Out By Robert Frost

Every day, people are faced with responsibility. Some thrive under the pressure while others crumble. Responsibility is a sign of independence. Teenagers with greater amounts of responsibility feel freedom from their parents. In the same case, too much responsibility can put more stress on that freedom-seeking teen and can have devastating effects. John Steinbeck shows the theme that in life, responsibility is best taken in moderation in his novel Of Mice and Men.

The tone of the poem changes as the poem progresses. The poem begins with energetic language like “full of heroic tales” and “by a mere swing to his shoulder”. The composer also uses hyperboles like “My father began as a god” and “lifted me to heaven”. The use of this positive language indicates to the responder that the composer is longing for those days – he is nostalgic. It also highlights the perspective of a typical child. The language used in the middle of the poem is highly critical of his father: “A foolish small old man”. This highlights the perspective of a typical teenager and signifies that they have generally conflicting views. The language used in the last section of the poem is more loving and emotional than the rest: “...revealing virtues such as honesty, generosity, integrity”. This draws attention to a mature adult’s perspective.

The first stanza, which contains the son’s childish speech, is short, only three lines. However, by the stanza which contains the son’s angry talkback, the stanza is double in length, having four lines. Each line represents a literal level of maturity and growth that the son has gained. As time moves on, he is able to gain more and more experience in life. As his experience accumulates over time, so does his hostility. His terse, childish begging for his father to simply read another story turns to an angry speech about how he no longer beleievs in his father as an authority figure. Despite this, the son’s psyche changes back, as all this maturation is played out in the father’s head, and when he returns, he is back to his childish self, bu this stanza is the longest in the poem. This suggests that when someone is able to mature enough, they are able to comprehend more of the world than they did before, and are able to act

Each part was broken up after a noticeable shift and atmospheric changes in the poem. The first part of the poem is during “Sad is the man...with one”(Ln 1-2), and repeats again at “In a room...on his father”(Ln 6-9). These lines create a shift into a narrative stage. It puts a pause on the poem to introduce or explain the scene in the poem. The narrative is important because it shows the point of view of the poem. The second shift is created with “Already the man...should never disappoint”(Ln 10-18). This shift is when the father is thinking about his fears and desires, to be more blunt, the father’s fantasies. It creates an unrealistic tone to the poem an shows the father’s dismay when he cannot remember a story for his son. The last shift begins with “His five-year-old...scratches his ear”(Ln 3-5), and ends with “But the boy...up to silence”(Ln 19-23). This shift bring the poem into reality. In fact the poem states that the “emotional rather than logical equation”(Ln 20) is where most people get confused and frustrated at the world. The poem also states the conflict of fantasy and reality. This conflict is what creates the the multiple shifts and the complicated relationship between the father and the

The last line in the poem “and since they were not the ones dead, turned to their own affairs” lacks the emotions the reader would expect a person to feel after a death of a close family member. But instead, it carries a neutral tone which implies that death doesn’t even matter anymore because it happened too often that the value of life became really low, these people are too poor so in order to survive, they must move on so that their lives can continue. A horrible sensory image was presented in the poem when the “saw leaped out at the boy’s hand” and is continued throughout the poem when “the boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh…the hand was gone already…and that ended it”, this shows emphasis to the numbness the child felt. The poem continues with the same cold tone without any expression of emotion or feelings included except for pain, which emphasizes the lack of sympathy given. Not only did the death of this child placed no effect on anyone in the society but he was also immediately forgotten as he has left nothing special enough behind for people to remember him, so “since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs”. This proves that life still carries on the same way whether he is present or not, as he is insignificant and that his death

The sense throughout the entire poem is that the speaker is nervous about embarking on a new journey in their life. Something encapsulated perfectly when the speaker says “this is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself” (24). The irony here is that many children dream of becoming older from the time they can talk. Hell, maybe even before that. They see a distorted view of freedom in adulthood and oppression in childhood. This speaker’s view of blossoming out of childhood, however, is bleak and contrast with what most children want. Maybe the speaker is scared of getting closer to going to high school, having to leave certain things or people behind or, maybe they just fear change in general. The poem does not hand the correct interpretation to the reader and leaves it up for interpretation, something that makes the poem more powerful by allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions as to why the speaker is apprehensive about reaching their new milestone. Thus rings the bell, calling for a pause of reading and the start of thinking. This openness leaves different readers with different backgrounds, different experiences and different personalities to all read differently into what the speaker fears about growing up. A reader who grew up affluent may attribute this concern as a normal progression of feelings which starts as fear but grows into excitement due to having new experiences to enjoy. A reader who grew up poor may think the speaker realizes they will have to make tough decisions to survive and that the best years of their life are behind them. This openness of having different people read differently into the speaker’s irony is why a thirty-two-line poem leads to an infinite amount of interpretations. As well as being used for humour, irony is also used to highlight certain expectations of growing

Apart from that, the poem consists of a series of turns that reflect different parts of the speaker’s feelings and the experiences he had. The significance of these turns is made possible through the use of stanza breaks. For example, the first

"Out, Out" is a great example of a typical Robert Frost poem. This narrative poem tells a story of human tragedy through the death of a young boy. The poem shows how fragile life can be and how it can be taken from people in an instant. The boy's tragic death is illuminated for the reader by a commentator watching the incident from the outside looking in. There is a lot of detail given to the reader early on describing the saw and the way it "snarled and rattled." These details and the emphases on the boy's age and his wanting to leave work early made the situation destined for tragedy. It was as if Frost was preparing us for the tragedy to come, "And nothing happened: day was all but done"(9). This suggests that something is definitely going to happen. Another clue that something awful is about to happen is the way the saw is personified it: " leaped out of the boy's hand" (16). As it is described, the saw jumped out of the boy's hand when he is called for supper, "As if to prove that saw knew what supper meant" (15). Through the use of onomatopoeia, the saw is also made to sound vicious like an attack dog when it is heard to snarl and rattle. The personification and description of the noises of the saw makes defiantly it seem like a major character in the poem.

In the poem the speaker tells us about how his father woke up early on Sundays and warmed the house so his family can wake up comfortably. We are also told that as he would dress up and head down stairs he feared ¨the chronic angers of that house¨, which can be some sort of quarrel between his father and his mother in the house. This can also lead the reader to believe that the father may have had been a hard dad to deal with. However the father would polish his son's shoes with his cracked hands that ached. This shows the love that the father had for his son and now that the son has grown he realizes what his father did for him. The sons morals and feelings have changed him because as he has grown to become a man he has learned the true meaning of love is being there for one's family and not expecting it to be more than what it is. Consequently this teaches him a lesson on how much his father loved him and how much he regrets not telling him thank

Robert Frost takes our imagination to a journey through wintertime with 
his two poems "Desert Places" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". These two poems reflect the beautiful scenery that is present in the snow covered woods and awakens us to new feelings. Even though these poems both have winter settings they contain very different tones. One has a feeling of depressing loneliness and the other a feeling of welcome solitude. They show how the same setting can have totally different impacts on a person depending on 
their mindset at the time. These poems are both made up of simple stanzas and diction but they are not straightforward poems.

The poem sits easily on a page and is visually satisfying, although this is in part due to the visual rhymes previously mentioned. This appearance though is false as the poems content is analysed but reinforces the theme of appearance and reality in the 4th stanza. Again, the "controlled" use of structure can be seen as adding to the poems "passion" showing a masterful combination of the two. The repetition of and permutations on the line: "my heart is breaking for a little love" is another structure that reinforces the poems meaning and show the despair that the poem communicates. The move away from the 1st person in the last two stanzas serves to provide a different perspective on the emotions discussed allowing a broader view than if the whole poem was in the first person, again this use of structure emphasises the underlying emotions.

The imagery shows that since the character is young and responsible, he works to support him and his family. We are first introduced to the image of the young boy working as a young adult. Then, in the first 9 lines, the author describes the setting of the poem using imagery such as, “sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it,” “Five mountain ranges one behind the other,” “under the sunset far into

In Robert Frost’s poem “Out, Out” an overwhelming theme of agony can be sensed as

A Comparison of The death of a hired man and Out, Out- by Robert Frost

Robert Frost tells a disturbing story in 'Out, Out, --', in which a little boy loses his life. The title of the poem leaves the reader to substitute the last word of the title, which some would assume would be out because of the repetition. The title is referring to the boy exiting the living world. Frost drags the reader's mind into the poem with the imagistic description of the tools and atmosphere the little boy is surrounded by.