Robert Frost

Out, Out—

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.
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.
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.
His sister stood beside them in her apron
To tell them “Supper.” At the word, the saw,

Saw as character

The saw "snarled," "rattled," and "leaped"—verbs that suggest animal agency. This personification makes the saw seem almost intentional, not accidental, which matters for how we read the accident.

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,

Ambiguous responsibility

"He must have given the hand" and "Neither refused the meeting" are Frost's way of refusing to assign blame. The boy may have been distracted, may have reached, may have been careless—Frost keeps it uncertain.

Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
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.

Ether and pulse

The poem shifts from the boy's perspective to medical detail. "Dark of ether" is anesthesia, but also suggests unconsciousness and death. The "watcher at his pulse took fright" means the boy dies under anesthesia, not from the injury itself.

The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.

Ether and pulse

The poem shifts from the boy's perspective to medical detail. "Dark of ether" is anesthesia, but also suggests unconsciousness and death. The "watcher at his pulse took fright" means the boy dies under anesthesia, not from the injury itself.

Ether and pulse

The poem shifts from the boy's perspective to medical detail. "Dark of ether" is anesthesia, but also suggests unconsciousness and death. The "watcher at his pulse took fright" means the boy dies under anesthesia, not from the injury itself.

And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.

Arithmetic of nothing

"Little—less—nothing!" counts down the heartbeat to zero like a mathematical proof. This is Frost's most direct statement: the boy's life reduces to arithmetic, then stops.

No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

How Frost refuses sentiment

The poem's emotional power comes from what Frost *doesn't* do. He doesn't describe pain, doesn't linger on the boy's fear, doesn't moralize about the tragedy. Instead, he reports: saw runs, hand is gone, boy dies, adults move on. This flatness is the point.

Notice the final lines: "No more to build on there. And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs." Frost treats the boy's death as a fact with no redemptive meaning. The adults don't grieve; they return to work. This isn't callousness—it's realism. Rural life in 1916 (when Frost wrote this) offered no pause for tragedy. The world continues indifferently.

The poem's title comes from Macbeth's "Out, out, brief candle," but Frost's version is colder. Shakespeare's dying general gets philosophical; Frost's boy gets nothing. He's simply gone, and the machinery of life moves on.

The accident as inevitability, not surprise

What makes this poem different from other industrial-accident poems is that Frost never frames the injury as shocking. "And nothing happened: day was all but done" suggests the accident is almost unremarkable—just another moment in a long afternoon.

The saw's "leap" toward the boy's hand is described with deliberate ambiguity: "or seemed to leap." Was it the saw's fault? The boy's? The sister's distraction? Frost refuses the comfort of blame. The accident feels inevitable because no one was careless enough to deserve it—it simply happened. The boy was doing man's work; he was old enough to know; the saw was doing what saws do. The tragedy isn't that someone failed; it's that systems grind on regardless of who gets caught.

This is why the ending hits hardest. The boy's death isn't treated as a moral lesson or a waste—it's treated as a fact. "No more to build on there" is Frost's way of saying: this boy will never grow up, never become anything, and that's simply how it ended.