All three themes inevitably discuss the theme of death not only as something that happens once to our bodies but as a much needed transition inherent in nature and human life- dying to the old to give birth to the new.
Shakespeare's Influence
The poem “Out, Out-” and its primary theme come from the beginning of the poem itself- the title. It is of course a dialogue that is not written in the poem despite the poem itself using ‘out’ twice- ‘Leaped out at the boy's hand’ and ‘He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath’.
The dialogue which the title is referring to is of course from ‘Macbeth’ by William Shakespeare, “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:. . .”. These lines are said by Macbeth when he finds out that his wife has died comparing her life, and everyone else's, to that of a candle- brief and meaningless. Our ‘strutting’ (joys) and our ‘frets’ (struggles) are all meaningless due to the brevity of life.
Frost hints at this soliloquy to borrow not only its theme, but the way Macbeth treated death without rage, tears, or wailing similar to the young man’s family, ‘And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs’ and instead dealt with death with an understanding of how little life really means, “a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing”.
This line is a parallel to Frost’s ‘No more to build on there’ which on first reading could give one the impression of the poet’s own callousness but on further analysis really reaffirms the world of the living- one which continues and gives meaning by its very existence. It is Death that creates the meaning/non meaning dualism which Frost tries to represent at the boy’s death with, ‘Little - less - nothing! - and that ended it’. What is the point of reacting towards the inevitability of Death with behavior that will make life anymore difficult?
Nature
A common theme of Frost’s contemporaries was that of nature itself as the ultimate sublime, “And from there those that lifted eyes could count / Five mountain ranges one behind the other / Under the sunset far into Vermont”. This is the first of many ironies in the poem.
The first is that the boy’s distraction at looking at the sublime landscape causes him to lose control of the chainsaw and bring about his own death. The second is that this very line is, “a parody of Psalm 121, which reads ‘I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help’ ... in Frost’s depiction of nature here, no help will come from the hills or from the great beyond” (Pack, 26).
Frost is of course skeptical of this utopic view of nature and gives nature in his poem the human qualities of anger and the capability of destruction. The poem is about a wood logger after all who is cutting down trees and killing them- it should only be fit that a personified nature would allow the young boy to die with the very tool he was using to murder trees.
Becoming an Adult
A personal theme of Frost which can be seen in many of his poems is that of the attainment of manhood, “Once born into Frost’s world, male children bear a great burden about which they must be made aware, and they must be wasted from the protective, enveloping mother so that they may be fully appraised” (Kearns, 17).
In “Out, Out-” a boy is essentially doin a man’s work, everyday that he survived was letting him get closer to the holy grail of the patriarchal world, ‘being a man’. But in this poem we are not presented with a man but a boy pretending to be one, ‘Since he was old enough to know, big boy / Doing a man's work, though a child at heart’ and he pays for this bad imitation with his own death.
In a world where children have to use chainsaws and make supper in order to survive, adults cannot distinguish between when a child is really ‘able’ to do the job at hand. This death of childhood, where a boy only wants the work to finish and the world of adults to end, ‘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’ is what Frost so poignantly depicts and laments.
Conclusion
In Robert Frost’s poem “Out, Out-” there is a very intense awareness of death and the darkness, absence, and ‘nothingness’ that will result because of it. This is just as relevant to an epic tragedy like ‘Macbeth’ as it is to a young Vermont wood cutter because Death in itself essentially makes everything else meaningless.
The other aspects of death including the need to cause death to nature to survive and the need to kill the child to become the adult are all weaved in to the central theme of transition- one that is not only relevant to Frost and his characters but the very reader herself.
