Family Relations

Family Relations

by Roman Sympos

Not where he eats but where he is eaten.

Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 4, scene 3

Out, Out—

Robert Frost

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.

And from there those that lifted eyes could count

Five mountain ranges one behind the other

Under the sunset far into Vermont.

And 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.

Call it a day, I wish they might have said

To please the boy by giving him the half hour

That a boy counts so much when saved from work.

His sister stood beside him in her apron

To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,

As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,

Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—

He must have given the hand. However it was,

Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!

The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,

As he swung toward them holding up the hand

Half in appeal, but half as if to keep

The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—

Since he was old enough to know, big boy

Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—

He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off—

The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’

So. But the hand was gone already.

The doctor put him in the dark of ether.

He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.

And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.

No one believed. They listened at his heart.

Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.

No more to build on there. And they, since they

Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

Thanksgiving and Christmas bookend the season of candles—light, warmth—and of giving—thanks, presents—and of frost—darkness, death. Also, family. So what better time than the end of the year to consider a poem by a man named Frost about a candle going out, and a brother and sister?

The title of Frost's poem, “Out, Out--,” places us from the start in the world of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a world where death and trouble boil and bubble in dark corners, waiting to strike the unwary. Its source is Macbeth’s famous soliloquy on the wayward and meaningless fragility of life, which can be snuffed out with a breath: “Out, out, brief candle./ Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more: it is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.”

The world of Frost’s poem, too, is bending rapidly toward darkness: “those that lifted eyes could count/ Five mountain ranges one behind the other/ Under the sunset far into Vermont.” The “candle” in question is a nameless adolescent, “the boy”—“big boy,/ Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart”—who in the act of cutting cordwood with a circular saw accidentally saws off his hand when he turns to look at his sister, who’s just announced evening supper. Within minutes, he bleeds to death.

“No more to build on there,” opines the equally nameless “I” who tells the story. The boy’s life lacks an ending. Severed midway, it has no meaning. Filled with the “sound and fury” of a rattling, snarling buzz saw, it “signif[ies] nothing.”

If the boy’s life lacks meaning, however, his death more than makes up for it. His death, in fact, overflows with meaning, like the bleeding wrist he holds up with “a rueful laugh,” as though embarrassed at his stupid mistake.

Can we make this gruesome waking nightmare grimmer?

We can try.

But to do so, we must first pull back from our close examination of the text to a position where we can begin to take in the wider geographical and site-specific details of the scene.

Let’s begin with those five mountain ranges in Vermont. If those mountains are where the sun is setting, that must be west. Where, then, does the action take place? Clearly, New Hampshire, the state east of Vermont and the poet’s adopted home.

Frost was born in San Francisco and grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Except for a three-year sojourn in England, from 1912 to 1915, he’d been living with his wife and family in New Hampshire for sixteen years when he wrote “Out, Out--” in 1916. The poem is based on a similar tragedy that befell a 16-year-old named Raymond Tracy Fitzgerald, the son of one of Frost’s neighbors in Bethlehem, not far from the poet’s farm in Franconia. Frost had never met Raymond, who died in 1910, but he learned the circumstances of the boy’s death from surviving relatives. As reported in a local newspaper, the incident took place in the backyard of the Fitzgerald family’s home, and the details Frost includes—the exact nature of the injury, summoning a doctor, death from loss of blood and hemorrhagic shock—correspond to what we know of the actual event, absent the sister who announces supper.

Frost provides other details to link the poem to its real-life source, including its outdoor, domestic setting. It’s easy to miss them, apparently.

My students, when I was still teaching, were not the only readers to assume the poem takes place in a sawmill. You’ll find professional academics making the same mistake.[1]

But sawmills are typically housed in buildings and protected by roofs. Frost’s buzz saw is “in the yard.” No lumber mill would leave expensive, immobile machinery lying around outside to rust in the rain and snow. Moreover, no mill owner who wants to turn a profit would bother cutting cordwood for woodburning stoves. The capital expense for using a timber saw on anything other than ripping planks from a good-sized tree trunk would be prohibitive.

My students at least have AI as an excuse. When I asked my ChatBot point blank, it said, “Yes, the Robert Frost poem, ‘Out, Out—' takes place in a sawmill,” and underscored its reply by adding, “Setting: The poem is explicitly set in a sawmill yard where a young boy is working,” as though I were dozing or an idiot. But when I asked if sawmills are located indoors, it answered, “Yes, sawmills have been, and generally are, located in buildings or under a roof.” Which left me wondering how anyone working in a sawmill in New Hampshire could see the sun setting over the mountains in Vermont just by lifting their eyes. Picture windows? Unlikely.

Curtis Fox, tasked by The Poetry Foundation with interviewing the poet James Langlas about how he teaches “Out, Out—,” seems even more at sea than my students. [2] On his podcast, “Poetry Off the Shelf,” Fox tells Langlas he has difficulty with a few “bumpy spots” in the poem, including how the heck a “gas powered hand held buzz saw” could have “leaped at the boy’s hand” when both his hands were holding it. Langlas (out of politeness, I assume) doesn’t correct him.

Fox has no excuse for his confusion except ignorance, or to be more precise, laziness. If you Google “buzz saw,” you’ll find the term refers, generally, to any kind of circular, as opposed to reciprocating (back and forth), power saw. And if you read past the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on the subject, you’ll learn a lot about how, in the early decades of the twentieth century, portable tractor- or truck-driven buzz saws and their crews were hired by householders to cut stove-sized kindling out of cordwood.

Tractor-driven circular saw ripping logs along the grain. Cordwood saws cut logs laid

at a perpendicular angle to the blade, on a sliding table similar to this one, and cut

across the grain.

A cordwood buzz saw was much too big and unwieldy to be hand-held. It often consisted of a sliding tabletop with a gutter attached at a 90-degree angle to the saw blade. The flat surface could be slid toward the cutting edge of the blade and back again, feeding it the logs to be cut, one at a time.

The saw was transported to the work site where, typically, the customer would already have amassed a pile of logs to be cut, purchased from local farmers. These “cordwood” logs, says Wikipedia, were about 4 feet in length:

The cordwood would then be re-sawn and split to a length and circumference suitable for woodburning heaters and ranges. Almost all these [heating] devices were designed to accept 16-inch (410 mm) sticks, conveniently a piece of cordwood cut into three equal lengths. Once a piece of cordwood had been re-sawn to three 16-inch pieces, it could easily be split to stovewood size with an ax. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_saw)

Whether or not this was the arrangement the Fitzgeralds had made with the owner of the buzz saw, it is how the business is arranged in Frost’s poem, where the buzz saw “dropped stove-length sticks of wood.”

One admirer of “Out, Out—" who’s done a deeper dive into this subject than most is Patrick Gillespie, a Vermont carpenter and humorously self-effacing poet whose website, PoemShape, includes a lengthy, illustrated essay on the poem featuring interviews with people who’ve used the kind of portable cordwood saw Frost had in mind. Gillespie, an alert and acute and curious reader, provides a wealth of details on the history of the machine and its various permutations, as well as a sensitive interpretation of the poem’s narrative voice and a detailed close reading of Frost’s metrics. [3]

Scanning the poet’s iambic pentameter lines as closely as he does, Gillespie hasn’t time to remark on the larger rhythms that build tension throughout the poem as we approach its devastating conclusion. We can see as well as hear these rhythms if we pay attention to the length of Frost’s sentences and where they end—that’s to say, if we look for the periods.

In the first dozen lines, periods end-stop every third line, as well as line eight. The reading eye moves smoothly through each group of three, pausing at the comma ending lines two and seven only a millisecond longer than at the unpunctuated turns of the other lines before jumping left and beginning the next, then coming to a longer rest at the period that end-stops the last in the group. The rhythm is a lot like sawing lengths of cordwood into identical thirds: slide and cut, move hands left; slide and cut, move hands left; then a longer pause to lift the next piece of cordwood into place.

This reiterated three-line rhythm comes to an abrupt halt with the word “Supper,” in the middle of line 14, just as the boy is cutting his last piece of cordwood—to be precise, between the first and second cut. From here on, periods or other indications of a full stop—dashes, an exclamation mark—break Frost’s lines at random but with increasing frequency, like gasping breaths, until the boy’s fading pulse tells us he is dead: “Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.”

The rhythmic regularity of Frost’s blank verse triplets in the first fifteen lines of the poem is interrupted not only by the hesitant comma at the end of line two, but more insistently by the commas in the middle and at the end of line seven and midway through line eight. The mid-line commas in seven and eight impose an overlying polyrhythm on this third triplet in the series, mimicking the pauses in the saw's alternate snarling and rattling "[a]s it ran light, or had to bear a load" in cutting each log. This repeated, overlying rhythm, which matches precisely the time it takes for each "stove-length" line to be "cut," is completed by the colon dividing line nine, where "nothing happen[s]"--except cutting logs. But the longer intervallic pause at the end of eight, marked by a period and repeated like a hiccup or a stutter by the colon in the next line, portends the more violent interruptions to come, and announces a straying of attention from the work at hand to the lateness of the hour, when work will end and, presumably, supper will be served: "day was all but done."

Those men that "lifted eyes” from the saw to view the sunset—perhaps those waiting to load another log onto the cutting table and, thus, not in proximity to the vicious saw blade—have already begun to anticipate the end of day.

Every detail in these first nine lines is significant and anticipates the horror to come: the temptation to take your eyes off what you’re doing after a long day of doing it over and over, and the way boredom can heighten your sensitivity to irrelevant but pleasant sensations, like the sweet scent of sawdust so vividly, even lovingly, described in Frost’s third line.

“[T]he day was all but done,” but “[n]othing happened” (yet) to interrupt the work, so it continues and the triple rhythm resumes, almost entirely unimpeded, in lines 10-12:

Call it a day, I wish they might have said

To please the boy by giving him the half hour

That a boy counts so much when saved from work.

Who are “they”? The boy’s co-workers? Are they among “those who lifted eyes” to the west and noticed “day was all but done?” If the boy is the son of the family who’s paying them, as Raymond Fitzgerald was, helping out, perhaps, to reduce the sawyer’s fee, he’s not in their employ and they have no power to bind or release him. That would be up to his parents. Is it Michael and Margaret Fitzgerald, then, that Frost has in mind? It’s hard, if not impossible, to imagine them callously “turn[ing] to their affairs” just seconds after their son’s tragic death.

Aside from the boy’s sister, however, there’s nothing in “Out, Out—” to suggest this scene is unfolding in the boy’s own backyard. No other siblings are mentioned and his parents, if he has any, are conspicuously absent. There’s only Frost’s unspecified “they” and “them,” and his sister, and a doctor, and a mysterious “watcher at his pulse”—perhaps the doctor again.

And the buzz saw.

The most animate thing in Frost’s poem is an inanimate object. The poet’s violent personification of the buzz saw, “snarling and rattling, snarling and rattling,” has often been observed and commented on. Gillespie’s expert informant, Tom Hawkins, told him Frost got it right:

Those old one lunger type gasoline engines had counterweighted flywheels to keep up their momentum as they were running, this caused the saw rig to bounce somewhat. . . . It’s very possible that the saw did leap right out and take the [boy’s] hand, these type of saws really do jump, especially when they’re slowing to a stop, which appears to be the case here.

Snarling like a ravenous beast and rattling like a venomous snake, the buzz saw finally gets a taste of what has tantalized it all day long, approaching and retreating, teasing it repeatedly by its proximity: the boy’s hand.

No one else may know it’s supper time, but the buzz saw “knew what supper meant.”

That the saw is circular and not, as Gillespie speculates, reciprocal, is underlined by the way Frost uses turning, a repetitive, circular, mechanical motion, to characterize the human actors in this mundane tragedy, almost as if they, and not the saw, were inanimate machines lacking agency, deliberation, or full self-awareness.

After his hand is cut, for instance, the boy “swung toward” the onlookers “holding up the hand/ Half in appeal.” And don’t we have to imagine that, if his sister announces “Supper” while standing beside him (presumably to overcome the noise of the saw), he must have turned toward the sound and in this way “given the hand” to the saw without meaning to?

As for his co-workers, their indifference to his death is brutally registered in Frost’s last two lines, whose power pivots, like a circular saw blade, on the choice of verb. Oblivious as automatons, they “turned to their affairs.”

Karl Marx, while not the first, was certainly the most famous economist to observe how, in factories and mills, repetitive machine labor turns laborers into machines. Frost was no Wobblie, but his portraits of the working poor often seem to be taken from an illustrated edition of Das Kapital. “Out, Out—” has been read, among other things, as an indictment of child labor (common in New Hampshire before the state passed laws banning it in 1933), a comment on the pointless sacrifice of young men to the war raging in Europe, and a warning of the unintended consequences of technological innovation.

But it’s also a parable about survival on the lowest rung of this country’s socioeconomic ladder, down among those who earn their living by working with their hands. Here, in capitalism’s Ninth Circle, it’s the mindless, repetitive, soul-crushing, and dangerous work you do that does you in, destroys your health, shortens your life. Frost’s buzz saw tableau is not where the boy eats—his supper awaits inside—but where he’s eaten.

And there’s no one, it seems, who can protect him.

Poets are not bound by the historical facts that may have inspired them. Once the seed is planted, facts just get in the way, like a gardener who won’t remove his foot after tamping the soil. The stark, unforgiving realism of Frost’s best work would be seriously undermined by any hint of sentiment. For this reason, he cannot allow himself to do justice to the magnitude of the Fitzgeralds’ grief, to serve up a terrified father watching the boy’s pulse or a grieving mother at the boy’s side or a hysterical sibling wringing her hands. This young man is nobody’s son. He’s simply one of “them,” a laborer like them, a “big boy/ Doing a man’s work.” Perhaps his parents, wherever they are, approve, even admire him, because the family can’t survive unless he’s put to work. Or his parents are dead, leaving only his sister to depend on him.

Which leaves me with just one question: what’s the sister doing here? If this isn’t her brother’s house, if he's just a wage-laborer like the rest of "them," how can it be hers?

If there’s a “bumpy spot” in “Out, Out—” it’s not how a handheld saw can cut off the hand that’s holding it, but the sudden appearance, and just as sudden disappearance, of the boy’s sister. Frost doesn’t need her any more than he needs a parent or any other family relative. He just needs someone to announce “Supper.” He could have introduced what used to be known as “the lady of the house,” who’d be in charge of the kitchen and, in small-town or rural settings like this, expected to provide nourishment and refreshment for the crew working all day in her dooryard. Or it could be a daughter of the family.

What it can’t be is the boy’s sister.

If you’re like me, you don’t like “bumpy spots” in your poetry—facts that look tilted, arrangements that contradict themselves. And if you admire and feel gratitude toward the great poets who’ve given you so much pleasure (it is, as I say, the season for giving and thanking), you cannot rest easy until you’ve found a way to help them out. My friend and editor, Professor Rzepka, once spent the better part of two years helping John Keats defend himself from charges of bone-headed ignorance for suggesting that Cortez, and not Balboa, was the first European to discover the Pacific Ocean [4]. I’m not sure I can do as well for Robert Frost, but here’s what I’ve come up with.

It starts with a question: Did sawyer’s crews like this one, hauling their portable buzz saw from house to house, making “sweet-scented” sawdust in yard after yard, often for an entire day at a time, sometimes bring along someone to cook or otherwise prepare their meals? Does the sister, like her brother, work for “them”?

I didn’t think my Chatbot could handle this question, but it surprised me with an emphatic “No”:

Community Events: Firewood cutting was often a community or family event, a "bee" where neighbors gathered to help each other, and meals were likely provided by the host family or shared among participants.

And then, as if to rub my nose in it, I read this:

Small Crews: The operations usually involved a few men (family members or neighbors) working together, not large, remote logging camps that required a dedicated camp cook.

I seriously doubt that Frost set his poem in a logging camp, or that “remote logging camps” hired women as cooks.

So. Here's the best I can do.

The event takes place at the boy's house. He's helping out, "big boy/ Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart." His sister is inside, helping their mother prepare supper. The men feeding the saw have worked all day, until the sun has almost set. It never occurs to them to "call it a day" before supper is ready, or to tell the boy to stop. There's a lot of cordwood to get through and it's not up to "them"--paid or not, laborers or neighbors or friends--to "please the boy by giving him the half hour/ That a boy counts so much when saved from work." That's his parents' lookout. His father might even be working beside him. Maybe he's among "those who lifted eyes" to the sunset in Vermont just now, and missed the horrific moment when his daughter announced "Supper" and his son fed his hand to the machine.

This smooths the bump out pretty well, but leaves a crack in the pavement: the parents' entire absence from the poem, a blank space that looks and feels more inexplicable, even bizarre, the further you let the horror sink in. It seems like a self-indulgence, Frost's characteristic insistence on the indifference of the universe, and of a numbed humanity, to human suffering, and its strangeness is, if anything, heightened, not reduced, by the sister's sudden appearance at line seventeen.

The only explanation I can think of is this:

The cook is the boy’s sister because even Frost didn’t have the heart to deny him at least one living blood relative to turn to in his hour of need. She is there, not just to “[t]ell them ‘Supper’” and, in doing so, initiate the grim chain of events to follow, but to hear the boy’s plea: “‘Don’t let him cut my hand off—/ The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’” Though her grieving may go unheard and her tears remain invisible, his sister is the boy’s only consolation in a world otherwise as dark and cold as death itself. She brings “Out, Out—” as close to pathos as any poem by Robert Frost can get or, perhaps, the poet could bear to go.

That alone is worth a bump in the road.

***********************************

I invite my readers to offer their own explanations for Frost’s “bumpy spot” in the Comments section of Sympos. I’ll bet there is one, and it’s probably staring me in the face.

Notes:

1. “Dissecting Poetry: 'Out, Out-' by Robert Frost,” Swarnananda Gamage, December 2018.

At: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329963404_Dissecting_Poetry_'Out_Out-'_by_Robert_Frost

2. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53087/out-out

3. I highly recommend visiting Gillespie’s site.

https://poemshape.wordpress.com/2009/07/18/robert-frosts-out-out-2/

4. “‘Cortez--or Balboa, or Somebody Like That’: Form, Fact, and Forgetting in Keats’s ‘Chapman’s Homer’ Sonnet.” Keats-Shelley Journal 51 (2002): 35-75.

Poetry Foundation, “Poetry Off the Shelf” with Curtis Fox, interviewer, commentary on the poem—audio. poet and teacher James Langlas. interviewer: “gas powered hand held buzz saw”?? A “bumpy spot”—“with those kinds of saws you’re holding them with both hands”—“how did it leap up and cut off one hand”? “Kind of smutched . . . “ And Langlas agrees! “I don’t have an image in my head,” says the interviewer. Nor does Langlas!

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53087/out-out

AI: “Yes, sawmills have been, and generally are, located in buildlings or under a roof.”

AI: “Yes, the Robert Frost poem, “Out, Out—” takes place in a sawmill.”

“Setting: The poem is explicitly set in a sawmill yard where a young boy is working”