Monday, May 16, 2016

How is the theme of loss presented in "Out, Out--" and "Disabled"?

Both are grim poems that tell the story of a loss experienced by a young man
In "Out, Out—," a boy using a buzz saw is distracted by his sister announcing that it's supper time. The saw seems to "leap" away from him. In doing so, it cuts off his hand. A little later, the boy, who is described as a child doing a man's job, dies. The world moves on, indifferent to his fate.
In "Disabled," a young man enlists to fight in World War I and ends up disabled, losing an arm and both legs. Ironically, he joined the army because being a soldier seemed heroic and made him more attractive to women, but now that he is disabled, women no longer have an interest in him.
Both poems show that mechanized, industrial society—the society that produces buzz saws and the bombs and weapons used in World War I—poses great risks to young men who are not truly ready to handle its dangers. In both poems, a young man either loses his life or loses his hope of a meaningful life because mechanized society does not sufficiently value individual human life.


In Robert Frost's poem "Out, Out--" loss has many meanings. First, the boy sawing wood feels the loss of his free time and his freedom when he isn't dismissed a half hour early from work. As Frost writes, "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." The boy loses this vital half hour, and it is then that he loses his hand. Suddenly, with the loss of his hand, the boy knows that he has lost all the promise of his young life. As Frost writes, "He saw all spoiled." The boy fears losing his land and sadly loses his life. 
Frost's poem details a series of losses that build to the loss of life. The boy first loses his freedom and then his hand and then his life. There is a connection between the loss of the boy's freedom and youth while working in a mill and the subsequent loss of his life, implying that once the boy goes to work cutting wood, he has begun to lose his vital youth and that everything soon will be taken away from him, including his life.
In Wilfred Owen's poem "Disabled," a maimed veteran acutely feels the loss of his legs and arm (or arms). With the loss of his arm and leg, the veteran has also, like the young man in "Out, Out--", lost his youth and vitality. Though the character in "Disabled" still is alive, he has lost much of what he had to live for. Owen writes, "Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn." The voices sound sad to the veteran because they force him to think about how he can no longer run. 
The veteran cannot dance with a girl, and he feels this loss most acutely. As Owen writes: "Now he will never feel again how slim / Girls' waists are, or how warm their subtle hands, / All of them touch him like some queer disease." The veteran feels much less masculine, and he notices how women's eyes pass over him on the way to "strong men that were whole." In the end, he merely wants to go to bed, as the loss of his limbs has made him lose hope for the future. 

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