The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the
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
Five mountain ranges one behind the
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
To please the boy by giving him the half
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside them in her
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
Half in appeal, but half as if to
The life from spilling.
Then the boy saw all—Since he was old enough to know, big
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
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
This is based on a true event which is believed to have occured in April 1915,
Raymond Fitzgerald, the son of Frost’s friend and neighbour, lost his hand to a buzz saw and bled so profusely that he went into shock, dying of heart failure in spite of his doctor’s efforts. Frost’s title invites us to compare the poem’s shocking story with Macbeth’s speech on learning of his wife’s death:
A detailed analysis can be found here
The lyrical form of this poem is unrhyming.1.
The title is thought to be from Shakespeare's Macbeth,
V.v.15-28.
Macbethsays, on learning of the death of Lady Macbeth, his wife:
She should have died hereafter ;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time ;
And all our yesterdays have lighted
The way to dusty death.
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
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
See The Riverside Shakespeare, ed.
G.
Blakemore Evans (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 1337.
