On the surface, the poem tells the story of a young man’s death resulting from a saw injury to his hand. “Out, Out-” also tells the truth of the humanness in the boy’s own response and his family’s response to the sudden tragic death. This is something that cannot be communicated in a few lines of an informative news report. Poets have at their use a barrage of techniques to help convey ideas in ways not possible in news pieces. Instead of being limited to straightforward sentences, form and structure can be manipulated to drive home points. Sentence structure within poems can be changed, punctuation rules can be ignored. The use of onomatopoeia, alliteration, and rhythm can make a poem sound like what it is describing. Personification and visual references can create a setting seen in the mind’s eye. Robert Frost uses all of these devices in his poem, “Out, Out” to impart a truth not gained from reading the news report that covers the same event.

It can be said that truth takes many different forms and is made up of many different parts. One way to tell the truth is to tell the exact happenings and facts of a subject. The news item that appeared in The Littleton Courier is very straightforward. Details and facts of the tragedy are listed accurately and truthfully in this manner. From reading the news piece, it is clear what happened. A young man assisting with sawing wood at his home accidentally caused injury to his hand and died as a result of heart failure brought on by shock. Simple, straightforward, factual, and impersonal. However, there is much that is not told in the news report. What caused the boy to be so careless? Which shock does the news piece mean, the physical shock or the emotional shock? What of the boy’s family? The news report tells the truth, but not the whole truth. Answers to these questions cannot be told with listed facts because they center on emotional responses, the domain of poetry. Frost’s poem speaks not only factual truths, but speaks to truths of human nature.

In the first six lines of the poem, Frost describes the continuous buzz of the saw, the repetitious act of sawing wood, the sweet scent of wood in the air, the view of sunset and mountain ranges, “those that lifted eyes could count.” Through his description, Frost lets us know that the young man was daydreaming, letting his mind wander off his task. Frost personifies the saw starting with the first line of the poem. To say that the saw, “snarled and rattled” gives it an animal like quality. A young man still retaining a boy’s imagination might liken the unwanted saw to a lion or vicious dog. When his sister called for supper, then, he must have come back to his task with a start, momentarily caught off guard at such proximity with the dangerous animal/saw. Now we know how the injury really happened.

Another blank left in the news report is filled in by the poem’s description of the boy’s response to his injury. The poem definitely considers the effects of emotional shock in his death. The effect of seeing his injured hand is enough to skew the boy’s perception of reality and cause a great emotional shock. Frost’s language in lines 19-20, especially the “rueful laugh” and “swung” tells us something of his emotional state. This language implies a panic, heightened when he takes in the full picture of his mangled hand. Frost’s description of the boys belief that the hand could heal and be alright lets us know something of the internal strife and contradiction he is suffering. He sees the injured hand and knows the extent of his injury, but clings to a childlike denial of the reality. “Don’t let them cut my hand off…..Don’t let him, sister!” As we are told in line 27, there is no way the hand could have been saved. So from Frost’s poem, we know that the boy’s unlikely death from this particular injury resulted from more than only medical shock. Heightened panic and a frantic struggle to deny the obvious loss of the hand, something that would certainly seem incomprehensible to a young boy, produced an emotional shock that contributed to an enhanced physical reaction…heart failure. In Frost’s poem, there is the truth of his improbable death.

In regards to Frost’s poem, I have been talking of truth as a further enfolding of information to enhance the understanding of an event. Relaying all the emotional and sensory details to explain what could not be explained in the news report, a young man’s improbable death from a potentially non-life threatening injury, even though it told the truth. There is also truth as a foundation, truths that serve as tenets of human nature. Truth of this type is bound up in how the family deals with the death of their young son and brother, and is seen only in the poem.

“Out, Out” presents a truth that concerns how people deal with death. The suddenness of the boy’s death takes everyone present by surprise, the doctor and the family. Frost’s sentence structure in lines 30-32 helps to illustrate the blow. He writes short, choppy sentences. Dashes between the words “then” and “the” in line 30 and “Little-less-nothing!-and that ended it” in line 32 illustrate the breath catching astonishment his family must have felt. Our ability to connect with and understand the bewilderment on this level is only possible through the aid of Frost’s technique. It is only natural that, when a living person is face to face with death, there would be an urge to assert life. The young man’s family is placed in sudden close intimacy with death. It is natural that escaping such close proximity to death would be desirable. Thus Frost gives us the expression of the final lines. The young man’s family knows the finality of death. They also know that they wish to escape that finality, and in an effort to do just that, “since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.”

Frost’s poem, “Out, Out” is an excellent example of poetry’s truth telling capacities. This poem manages to deliver the factual truth, enhance our understanding of the truth, and deliver a deeper truth of human nature. This is the expertise that is unique to poetry. Because it is a poem, it encourages us to look for meaning and so is ideal for delivering truth. Only in poetry, can the very form and structure of sentences be manipulated to convey meaning. Only in poetry are single words able to create an image that changes the meaning of an innocuous thought to something deeper.