Figurative Language In Robert Frost's Out, Out

“Out, Out---” by Robert Frost is about a teenage boy that is using a buzz saw to cut firewood for his family. The boy loses his grip on the saw and cuts off his own hand. A doctor that is called to the farm gave the boy ether to ease the pain. Unfortunately by this point the boy had already lost too much blood and dies from the injury. The survivors return back to working.

Frost wrote the poem to show how circumstances can force innocent, young children to leave childhood behind. The boy was barely old enough to help support his family. Going to work was considered a life or death situation. In order to live, the people had to work and in order to work, the people had to risk their lives. During this time, young men were forced to go to war,

Figurative language is where words go “beyond” their defined meanings. A phrase that departs from everyday literal language for the sake of comparison, emphasis, or clarity. Literal language is a statement that interprets exactly the way something is stated. Frost used figurative language as the saw “leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap—He must have given the hand” (16-17.) Usually when a hand is “given” it is for a greeting of some sort such as a handshake. However, when “neither refused the meeting” (18) meant that figuratively speaking, the saw cut the boys hand off. The boy held up his hand in order to keep “the life from spilling” (22) is an example of literal language as it meant that the boy was trying to avoid bleeding to

Repetition is the repeating of a single word to provide emphasis while alliteration is the repetition of a single letter. It’s obvious that Frost would repeat “snarled and rattled” (1, 7) while the saw was cutting because saws are in a continuous motion while they cut, and cut, and cut. The repetition of “snarled and rattled” leads to the alliteration of the letter “R” throughout the poem. “Supper” (14) is the word that caused the distraction continued the alliteration of the “R”. A rhyme scheme is the arrangement of similar sounds in a poem but as mentioned earlier, there is not a rhyming scheme in this