Analysis Of The Poem 'Out, Out' By Robert Frost

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Poetic Analysis of “Out, Out-” by Robert Frost In Robert Frost’s poem, “Out, Out-” the poet uses literary devices to reflect loss. A boy is out cutting firewood when his sister calls him for supper. The young boy, careless from young age, gets too excited and accidently cuts off his hand. He begs his sister to not let him lose his hand, while inwardly realizing he has lost too much blood to survive the accident. He dies while under anesthesia and the rest of the world continues on. Robert Frost has written an extended metaphor portraying how rapidly loss approaches. The imagery displays the idea of loss. First we read the title, a quote from Macbeth, and some of it has been cut off. It appeals to our senses by using a hyphen and a making us feel the loss of the rest of the quote. Next we go to the boy cutting wood, a loud, noisy process, which is lost after the boy is called for dinner. Once the noise is silenced, we are left with only the image of the loss of sound. Then we find out the boy has cut of his hand. The horrific scene is a gruesome, bloody image, we can tell because his life is ‘spilling’. The boy soon loses his pulse. The image is referring to our sense of loss with it slowly and surely dying out. The image of loss continues once…show more content…
In lines 19 and 20 he writes, “as if to keep the life from spilling”, a metaphor for the boy trying not to die. “Dark of ether”, in line 26. is portraying a loss of knowledge. Ether,also known as anesthesia, is a metaphor for the lose of knowledge of what is happening to you. Line 36 states, “No more to build on there,” giving us the loss of life. The statement is a way of telling the reader that the boy has died, giving us the loss of a human life. In line 9 Frost states, “day all but done,” giving us the loss of time. Line 20 states, “Little-less-nothing!”, meaning the loss of the boy’s heartbeat. Frost’s poem has given us many examples of loss through his

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