Robert Frost's Out, Out

Literary Devices of Out, Out

Robert Frost's poem Out, Out, effectively uses multiple literary devices to create coherence and a deeper meaning. This poem is an example of Frost's work that illustrates rural life and colloquial speech, which he was famous for writing. The poem is set on a farm and focuses on a young boy completing his chores, only to be distracted by his sister which leads to is death. Robert Frost's Out, Out, illustrates the commonality of death through the uses of rural imagery, personification, and a somber tone and detached speaker which are simple recurrent devices in literature. By analyzing Frost's use of common literary devices and form in his poem Out, Out, one recognizes the hardships associated with farm living,
The poem is told in third person through the perspective of an unknown speaker who seems to be an onlooker to the event. The speaker prefaces the tragedy, "call it a day, I wish they might have said" (line 10). Since the speaker is referring to "they" and not giving any of the characters' names, infers a distant relationship between them and the speaker. This may be due to the speaker not being present and being omnipresent, or that the speaker is merely a bystander. As a result of the speaker's use of nondistinctive language creates a detached feeling to not only the boy and the situation, but to death in general. In addition, the family's name was not mentioned, which adds to the unattached and observant feeling that the speaker has already set in place. Even leading up to the boy's death, the speaker does not change the unembellished tone. "But the hand was gone already./The doctor put him in the dark of ether" (line 27-28). Even though this scene is gruesome and sorrowful, the speaker continues with the story. He does not elaborate on the visual or physical pain that was a consequence of the saw, but resumes to when the boy's "hand was gone". The jump in time shows that the actual injury was not the focus of the poem, but the build up and the aftermath. Since the speaker acknowledged what happened in such a straight-forward manner, shows that how it happened is not as important as to what happened. The brevity of the injury relates to the brevity of the event in the lives of the family. Also, throughout the poem, some of the lines are cut off with dashes at the end-similarly to the boy's hand. Typically, dashes are used when a writer wants to create extra emphasis on a sentence or subject. Looking back to the poem, the lines that dashes are used, are when the action takes place. For example, the dashes were used when the saw "Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or