20 pages • 40 minutes read
Robert FrostOut, Out—
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1916A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
The poem’s title, “‘Out, Out—,’” references William Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. When Macbeth learns that his wife is dead, he gives a short soliloquy:
[…] 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 (5.5.23-28).
Macbeth’s mourning expresses the idea that life is short and meaningless, comparing it to a candle that burns only for a short time and then is gone forever. From early on with its allusive title, the poem espouses Macbeth’s sentiments, the boy’s short life being their clear subject. Additionally, by associating the death of Lady Macbeth, a queen, with this anonymous farm boy, the title implies his death is no less tragic despite his humble stature.
However, Frost’s allusion to Macbeth even transcends the soliloquy. Like Frost’s poem, Shakespeare’s play includes hand imagery connected to violent death. In an earlier scene, Lady Macbeth utters lines that prefigure her husband’s; fretting over her complicity in murder, the Lady says, “Out, damned spot; out, I say” (5.1.30). She speaks figuratively of guilt, addressing a metaphorical blood stain, the “damned spot” she wishes to remove from herself—from her own hands.
Here and throughout the play, hand imagery ties to death, murder, and culpability. Though the Frost poem may only indirectly concern the concept of blame—the buzz saw is a kind of killer—the poem’s historical context (addressed below) suggests more symbolic culprits, such as industrialism.
Authorial & Historical Context
“‘Out, Out—’” is rich in historical context, with several aspects personal to the author. With its simplest and most direct backdrop, the 1916 poem is famously based on the traumatic real-life death of a farm boy, Raymond Tracy Fitzgerald, who had been friends with Frost’s children and died in an accident with a saw machine. However, even by this point, Frost was mourning his own hardships, as he and his wife Elinor lost two of their six children: Elliot died in 1900, and Elinor Bettina in 1907 just one day after her birth. Frost’s firsthand experience with the death of children informs at least some of the poem’s bitter sorrow.
Also by 1916, Europe was engulfed in the First World War, which would become one of the bloodiest wars in recorded history. Millions were killed, many violently like the boy in the poem—and at ages not much older than his. Even though the boy’s sudden and violent death is unrelated to battle or war, it parallels the plight of so many young men in the trenches.
Additionally, “‘Out, Out—’” reflects a significant departure from an agriculturally based economy to industrialism. For most of human history, economies were essentially agricultural, which provided some sense of generational continuity. However, with the invention of industrial machinery in the 19th century, many economies were disrupted, and the societal effects still reverberated at the time of the poem’s publication. Agricultural production didn’t cease but was industrialized, and the poem reflects this shift with the presence of the machine, the buzz saw. Though it’s a tool of great efficiency, the poem doesn’t celebrate this benefit. From the outset, the saw with its “snarl[s] and rattle[s]” (Line 1) is menacing, its lethality realized quickly and irrevocably. By extension, the poem implies industry is more fatal than salvific.
Finally, the economic shift precipitated a wider cultural shift—away from tradition and toward innovation. Much societal fabric changed rapidly from the latter half of the 19th century and into the early 20th when the poem was first published. The metamorphosis left many feeling powerless, anonymous, and insignificant amidst all the change. The boy’s death then crystalizes the unintended consequences of innovation.
Related Titles
By Robert Frost
