The narrator foreshadows the tragic event to come when he “wishes” that the workers would have “[called] it a day” and “[given]” the boy “the half hour that (he) counts so much when saved from work”, the adult responsibility of cutting wood with a buzz saw. When talking about the saw, Frost uses personification and repetition. Personification is seen when he says that at times it can “[run] light” and at others it has to "bear a load," talking as if the saw was a person who had to carry something. Repetition is used to help build an image of the saw's movements where the words "snarled and rattled" are used a couple of times throughout the poem. While “nothing [was happening]”, the boy’s sister comes out to tell him and the other workers that “Supper” is ready. The boy, in his excitement at the signal to end the day’s work, accidentally cuts himself with the perilous buzz saw. Frost reveals a sense of the boy’s pain by employing the oxymoron “rueful laugh”, displaying both the boy’s extreme surprise and deep sorrow at the near-amputation of his hand. Frost continues to depict the shocking scene by describing the boy’s reaction as he “[holds] up the hand, half in appeal…half as if to keep the life from spilling” from his body. The adult responsibilities the boy has been faced with, combined with the horrific mangling of his own hand, lead to the boy’s own terrible revelation that “all” will soon “spoil”, which foreshadows yet the next tragedy, the death of the boy.
Frost utilizes dialogue to convey the boy’s pleading voice as he begs his sister to not let the doctor “cut [his] hand off”. The sentence structure Frost chose was specifically selected to reflect the boy’s life as it begins to diminish. Compared with the first few lines of the poem, the concluding ones consist of short, choppy sentences as the boy becomes closer to death. The doctor arrives and gives the boy “ether”, an anesthetic, after which Frost describes the boy’s breathing as shallow and weakening while he “lay and puffed his lips out with his breath”. Frost paints such real images with his words that the reader can almost see as “the watcher at (the boy’s) pulse…[listens] to his heart” as the beating fades from “little” to “less” to “nothing”, which “[ends]” the boy’s life.
The theme does not become clear to the reader until the last sentence, depicting how the family and friends “[are] not the one dead”, so they “turn to their affairs”, and proceed on with their lives. Frost conveys the necessity of how people must go on, even after a tragedy such as the death of a loved one, because life continues, and so must they. Even though going on with life is a necessity, the speed in which the family and friends proceed to do so causes the reader to wonder what their motives are--necessity or selfishness.
