Out, Out--

Out, Out--

  • Submitted By: JKaye57
  • Date Submitted: 12/02/2009 10:02 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 1235
  • Page: 5
  • Views: 315

Discuss a writer’s depiction of death. What kind of language is available for representing death? What is its relationship to life? To spiritual belief?
Robert Frost “Out, Out—“

Robert Frost’s “Out, Out—“focuses on the suddenness of the death of a young teenage boy while doing what is considered a man’s job. There are several themes that take place in the poem but they all revolve around the death and how the death affects the people around him. The feelings within the poem depict what is happening. Each feeling represents a different portion of the poem that represents a different action that will be occurring or is foreshadowing a future occurrence. Several feelings that are felt within the poem consist of angry, fear, helplessness, and lonely. The title of the poem and the poem in itself go together when talking about death. The title is taken from a line in the play Macbeth written by William Shakespeare. Frost mixes in the ideas of theme, tone, and time to express the death and to show the significance of the young boy dying.
In "Out, Out--", many themes are present throughout the poem from the death itself to the setting of the poem. All of the smaller themes eventually make up the bigger theme of the death. Looking at the smaller themes, it can relate to the description of the relevance in the title. The theme that is seen throughout the poem is the emotional distance between the family members, which has been said before. One of the themes that ties in with the emotional distance is the suddenness of death that can occur. One moment the boy is alive, and within a span of what can be looked at as a few minutes, he's gone. As best quoted in the poem 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!"(31). This line brings up another key point in that poem that goes unnoticed--the idea of who the watcher is. The only person there is the young boy’s sister but...

Similar Essays