A Study Guide for Robert Frost's "Out, Out--"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Robert Frost's "Out, Out--," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535830430

Book preview

1

Out, Out—

Robert Frost

1916

Introduction

Out, Out— was first published in the 1916 collection Mountain Interval. Both the description of a terrible accident and a comment on the human need to resume one’s life after a tragedy, Out, Out— is one of Frost’s most shocking and disturbing performances. Like many of Frost’s poems, Out, Out— is written in blank verse, with the events described by an unnamed (yet characterized) speaker.

The poem is based upon a real incident. In 1901, Michael Fitzgerald, one of Frost’s friends and neighbors, lost his son Raymond during an accident with a buzzsaw; after accidentally hitting a loose pulley, the saw descended and began cutting his hand. He bled profusely and was rushed into the house; a doctor was called, but the young man went into shock and died of heart failure.

According to Jeffery Meyers (author of Robert Frost: A Biography), Frost thought that the poem was too cruel to read in public. For those readers who associate Frost with folksy, homespun philosophers observing the beauties of rural New England, Out, Out— will be something of a surprise—for the poem is, in a sense, cruel: the boy dies a terrible death and all the speaker can say is, No more to build on there. Even more shocking is Frost’s depiction of the adults who watch the boy take his final breaths. After his death, they turned to their affairs since they / Were not the one dead. Ultimately, Frost suggests, this turning away from death is, sometimes, the only possible