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¶ … Imagery and Theme in Frost's "Out"
Robert Frost's "Out" may appear to be simple in its narrative, straightforwardly telling a story, yet its complex poetic style enables the reader to experience the tragic events that occur through a variety of poetic devices that Frost uses. The poem demonstrates the fickleness of fate and how some things are beyond an individual's control. In "Out," Frost explores the limitations that an individual has over how their life turns out through vivid imagery and its theme.
The poem tells the story of a young boy who accidentally had his hand cut off by a buzz saw and who subsequently died from the shock. "Out" highlights how quickly things can happen and how even a quick response may be futile. Frost establishes a narrative backdrop through imagery and onomatopoeia. For instance, the poem opens, "The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard/And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood/Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it." This description helps to establish where the horrific incident took place; Frost also...
Frost establishes that this mill, or yard, is located somewhere where "lifted eyes could count/Five mountain ranges one behind the other/Under the sunset in far Vermont."
The tone quickly changes from a serene place where "sweet-scented stuff" fills the air to one of unexpected horror. Frost continues, "the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled/As it ran light, or had to bear a load/And nothing happened: day was all but done." Frost's use of repetition in these lines helps to illustrate how the saw was continuously running, whether there was no wood that was being cut, or a load had just come in. Despite it being a mechanical object, Frost personifies the buzz-saw to emphasize its seeming excitement to have reached the end of the day. While the that operates the buzz-saw clearly knows that it is quitting time when supper is called, the buzz-saw appears to react to the same dinner call; "At that word, the saw/As if to prove saws knew what supper meant/Leaped out at the…
Frost's poem mirrors the Biblical Fall story. The narrator explicitly states that he "let it fall and break," just as Eve let herself break down and eat from the tree of forbidden fruit (line 13). The narrator also notes, "But I was well / Upon my way to sleep before it fell," (line 15). He had already begun to lose consciousness, to succumb to desire and dreaming. Thus the
The contrast between Earth and Heaven is central to Frost's poem. Bowed birch boughs convey sharp distinctions between symbolic realms of Earth and Heaven. "Earth's the right place for love," the narrator states; but the human being will always climb back "toward heaven," (lines 53; 57). Thus, the poet addresses directly the dualistic forces of Earth and Heaven in "Birches." Structurally, "Birches" contains several distinct and contrasting elements, allowing the
Robert Frost's famous poem, "Birches," might be described as a poem of redemptive realism, a poem that offers a loving, yet tinged-by-the-tragic view of life as seen through the metaphors of nature. In fact, Robert Frost could be called a kind of subversive pastoralist, for unlike the romantic nature poets who preceded him, such as Wordsworth, he sees nature's wildness, her beauty, and yet her relentless harshness as well. The
The remainder of the poem assumes a more regularly rhythmic form, although the meter is not strict. Some of the remaining lines and stanzas follow an iambic hexameter, such as stanza three. However, many of the lines are in anapestic hexameter, or contain combinations of various meters. The poet inserts dactylic and anapestic feet along with iambic and also trochaic ones for intensity and variation, much as one would
While the poems are no doubt universal, we can see elements of Americana sprinkled throughout them. Cultural issues such as decision-making, the pressure of responsibility and duty, and the complexity of death emerge in many poems, allowing us to see society's influence on the poet. In "The Road Not Taken," we see how life is filled with choices. Because we are American, we are lucky enough to experience freedom
Frost Home Frost's Sense of Home Robert Frost is one of the most prominent American poets of the twentieth century, with poems that manage to evoke elegance and wisdom while remaining earthy and true to the straightforward American character at the same time. At the same time, there is often a sense of seeming directionless and uncertain, which is of course the flipside of the freedom and self-determination of the American way.