Analyze the way in which the buzz saw is characterized in Robert Frost's "Out,out--.Address the relationship between people and their objects of...

Frost's poem is based on a true incident which is believed
to have happened 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,
and died of cardiac arrest in spite of the best efforts of the doctor.  Frost’s title
invites us to compare the poem’s shocking story with Macbeth’s speech on learning of his
wife’s death:

The key to understanding the theme of Frost's
"Out, out-" lies in the intertextual reference to Shakespeare's "Macbeth"
Act V Sc.5, where Macbeth soliloquizes bitterly on the futility of life
after he learns of the death of his wife:

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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.

Frost's poem
ironically comments on the death of a small boy who dies tragically at such a young age
because of an accident when he was sawing wood.  His life is compared to a "brief
candle."

When the boy's sister announces that it's supper
time, the boy is distracted and even before he realizes it the saw has cut off his
hand:

His sister stood beside them 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—

Frost has anthropomorphized
the inanimate object 'saw' by giving it human attributes - 'knew' and 'leaped.' the word
'buzz-saw' itself is an example of onomatopoeia - the buzzing sound of the machine
saw.

The last two lines contain
the message or moral which Frost wants to convey to his readers. Frost's message is that
anything can happen at any time. There is no absolute safety or security for human life.
The next minute is not ours and we may be alive one minute and dead the very next
minute. The only thing that we can do is to go on with our lives. Just because the small
boy died it does not mean that all the others will die in a similar fashion. The death
of the small boy cannot be an excuse for inaction. So, the others continue with their
work and lives even after the death of the boy:

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.