Term Papers on Robert Frost

Term Paper Title	Robert Frost
# of Words	1032
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.13

Robert Frost

     When I, like most people, first read this poem, I saw the theme as an arbitrary death of a young boy that could have been easily avoided.  One critic wrote that, "the theme is the uncertainty and unpredictability of life...  A boy who is already 'doing a man's work' and gives every promise of having a useful life ahead of him is suddenly wiped out." (Laurence Perrine, Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry).  While this analysis fits quite well superficially, I believe it to be inadequate and lacking in sufficient depth.  Robert Frost describes his writing while being interviewed, and said, “…These poems are written in parable, so that the wrong people won’t understand, and so will be saved.” After all this is a criticism on a man who, like the poem, appears to be simple, but actually alludes to an underlying complexity.  After taking this into account, and reevaluating my criticism on this poem, this boy's life wasn't taken, but given by the boy himself.  Perhaps this was not a purposeful act, but instead a Freudian "slip", "He must have given the hand".
     Robert Frost personifies this buzz-saw almost as a kind of animal or beast from the very first line of the poem, "The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard".  Then goes on to paint a beautiful picture of "Five mountain ranges one behind the other / Under the sunset far into Vermont." and then reiterates the beastly snarling and rattling of the buzz saw.  This seems to clearly separate the boy, and the buzz saw from nature.  While the buzz saw is personified with animal characteristics, it is easy to see the “big boy” as a human machine that mindlessly feeds wood to it all day. The sunset continues and this boy and all but "... those that lifted their eyes..." continue their work with a mechanical indifference to the signs that "...day was all but done."  I feel that this seems to be the focal point of the story.  Why was this "boy" being worked all day?  In fact Frost seems to plead with "them", "Call it a day, I wish they might have said".  Here Frost is pointing out the perversion of working a boy all day long, and then not even "...giving him the half hour / That a boy counts so much when saved from work."  In a sense this boy is a slave to productivity and monetary progress.
     This boy’s life is in a prison who’s walls are productivity and industry, a good life for him is seen as a productive life, “No more to build on there.  And they, since they / were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.”  This idea of juvenile oppression also appears as the boys sister.  She has no doubt spent all day in the kitchen cooking, when, "His sister stood beside them in her apron / To tell them "Supper."  Then after the accident, he does not appeal to his mother or father, but to his si...

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