How one views life after death often shows a person’s character and their view of the world. When addressing such themes on mortality, poets will turn to literary devices to help share their viewpoint. The poem “’Out, Out-‘” by Robert Frost tells the story of a boy who loses his life because of a work accident. Frost expresses that spending life in a work mindset that is full of disturbances instead of living life to the fullest in peace will ultimately cause people to become desensitized to death and not celebrate life. The uses of imagery, word choice, and personification to convey Frost’s bleak view on mortality and how people view it. The use of imagery in the poem contrasts the gruesome and scary images surrounding the machinery with
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The onomatopoeia of “snarled and rattled” conveys the buzz-saw as animalistic and wild. When people spend their work days around objects such as the hostile buzz-saw, Frost indicates they tend to remove themselves from a more moral and vivacious perspective as seen through in the line “No more to build on there.” When the boy dies, the narrator feels that there was no need to mourn the loss, and there is nothing else to add on the situation. The workers in the poem find no need to stay and see what happens to the boy’s body or grieve because they don’t see the value of life anymore. The repetition of the noises the buzz-saw makes also shows how the machinery is unrelenting in its aggressiveness thus making this behavior the only one people will be in close contact with as they work and will close them off to the serenity of life. When the incident happened, the buzz-saw “leaped out at the boy’s hand.” This gives action to the buzz-saw’s bellicose behavior, and shows work is a disturbance that will only cause violence. The incident happens right before the boy’s sister is about to call him for dinner yet “as if…saws knew what supper meant” the saw struck out at the hand. Right before the boy was going to relax with his family, the saw attacks to distance the boy from maybe the one peaceful moment he gets in his day providing another example of people missing
The onomatopoeia of “snarled and rattled” conveys the buzz-saw as animalistic and wild. When people spend their work days around objects such as the hostile buzz-saw, Frost indicates they tend to remove themselves from a more moral and vivacious perspective as seen through in the line “No more to build on there.” When the boy dies, the narrator feels that there was no need to mourn the loss, and there is nothing else to add on the situation. The workers in the poem find no need to stay and see what happens to the boy’s body or grieve because they don’t see the value of life anymore. The repetition of the noises the buzz-saw makes also shows how the machinery is unrelenting in its aggressiveness thus making this behavior the only one people will be in close contact with as they work and will close them off to the serenity of life. When the incident happened, the buzz-saw “leaped out at the boy’s hand.” This gives action to the buzz-saw’s bellicose behavior, and shows work is a disturbance that will only cause violence. The incident happens right before the boy’s sister is about to call him for dinner yet “as if…saws knew what supper meant” the saw struck out at the hand. Right before the boy was going to relax with his family, the saw attacks to distance the boy from maybe the one peaceful moment he gets in his day providing another example of people missing