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Out, Out by Robert Frost Essay

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Out, Out

"Out, Out," by Robert Frost is a gruesomely graphic and emotional poem about the tragic end of a young boy's life. It is a powerful expression about the fragility of life and the fact that death can come at any time. Death is always devastating, but it is even more so when the victim is just a young boy. The fact that the boy's death came right before he could " Call it a day" (750) leads one to think the tragedy might have been avoided and there by forces the reader to think, "What if." This poem brings the question of mortality to the reader's attention and shows that death has no age limit.

It was powerful poems such as "Out, Out" that gave Robert Frost the reputation as one of America's leading 20th century poets. The …show more content…

This was the start of Frost's reputation as one of the great American writers of the 20th century.

"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.

The theme of this poem is the boy's

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