Robert Frost's poem "Out, Out--" quickly narrates a rather grim scene of death with little guidance given for a tone of response from the audience. Frost originally published this poem in his third book of poetry named Mountain Interval, in 1916. Frost sets this poem's location near the mountains of Vermont, at sunset, just as the supper call comes at the family lumber mill. The poem tells of a young boy who looses his hand and his life forthwith, to a buzz saw accident and the response to the premature death by the family and witnesses. The tone of the poem could be interpreted as dangerously callous to the light reader, given the poem's closing ideal there is "[n]o more to build on there" (33) as a response to the death of the child by those present just before they "turned to their affairs" (34). America's entry into World War One in 1917 rightly provokes paying careful consideration to the era of the poem's publication and the literal toil it took most people to survive. Family saw mills and millworks were busy places where all members of the household provided sustenance as a joint obligation. The tone of the poem is better interpreted from the perspective of a retelling of events that led to the death of a child in a period of our past that did not allow the platitude of extended mourning. The acceptance of death as finality and the continued provocation that life must go on overruled any such luxuries. Using several techniques including imagery, both visual and auditory, repetition, and personification Frost builds a tone of blunt perseverance in the face of death.
             Frost uses auditory and visual imagery to pull the audience into the poem's setting. The opening of the poem introduces a loud, "snarl[ing] and rattl[ing]" (1) buzz saw as the center of attention in the mill "yard" (1). Frost sets this image, as if in juxtaposition, against the &...