'Out, Out'- Robert Frost

• Context:

  - Robert frost is an American poet, best known for his descriptions of rural life

  - Lives in the mountains of Vermurt

  - This poem is an intertextual reference, when one text refers to images and lines from another text

  - Macbeth's famous soliloquy, muses on the nature of life before death, on the mark he made and human desire

  - Thinking about mortality, pointless and shallow to strive to be important

  - Candle (out, out) is a metaphor for life, sort and easily

  - Legacy dissapears after time, but time never ends
• Points:

  - A criticism of rural life or and observation of how child labour in rural conditions can lead to a tragic loss of life

  - Death is normalised if poverty is a driver in everyday life

  - Death is meaningless and insignificant, has no meaning as time continues and people carry on with their lives

  - Structure: Turning point, iambic pentameter (10 syllables per line), anticlimax, caesura (dramatic pauses), zoomorphia
• "And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled, as it ran light or had to bear a load"


  - Repetition of "snarled and rattled", zoomorphic, monster-like and makes it seem brutal

  - Foreshadows the accident

  - Emphasises the danger, imagery stays with the reader, dangerous tool
• "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"


  - "Call it a day builds" dramatic tension, rueful tone, reader predicts the accident to come"

  - Repetition of "boy" emphasises his youth and young life

  - Show the conventions of rural communities, child labour was a normality, writer critiques it
• "Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap —"

  - Zoomorphic again, almost as if it wasn't a mistake, like a one-sided attack

  - Dramatic tension reaches its peak

  - Turning point

  - Shows the horror of the accident, boy was too young to operate the machinery

  - Tragedy, shows how easily life is lost in this world
• "Big boy doing a man's work, though a child at heart —"


  - Dramatic irony, reader knows what happened, though the boy is too young and doesn't know the dangers of mechanical labour

  - Uses the word "boy" again, shows that he would not be doing this work

  - "Still a child at heart" criticises and conveys how children lose their childhood, and in this case their entire lives, doing a man's job

  - Caesura again
• "They listened at his heart. Little—less—nothing!"


  - The dashes create drama and dramatic tension

  - The tragic climax of the story, the boy loses his life

  - Narrative voice almost like a storyteller or a piece of gossip, shows what his life is reduced to

  - His death has no meaning to anyone, no thought was put to it

  - Shows how time goes on, and his death was only a moment in time
• "And they, since they were not the ones dead, turned to their affairs."

  - Dark humour, implies how insignificant his death was regarded

  - Climax followed immediately by an anticlimax

  - His death was unremarkable, links back to Macbeth, one singular life is meaningless because time goes on and people lose interest, return to their own work and issues

  - Everyone lives their own lives, though people never put any thought to it