Prompt CI has chosen to write a reader's critical response to Robert Frost's poem “Out, Out.” I guess I have a strange way of looking at things because this isn't the first time I have a different opinion on what a poem or story means than most of the class. I don't necessarily think everyone else is wrong, I just think I can justify my way of thinking too. In "Out, Out" we as a class talked about the fact that the boy had a terrible accident and died and how everyone then went back to work. I felt it was more about nature and the destruction of trees and forests. The first five lines just give you the picture of what the woods smell like and how many trees have fallen "Sweet smelling stuff when the breeze" And the saw growled and rattled, growled and rattled (524). This gave the impression that the saw was not a good thing. I read the rest of the poem as if the trees were telling the poem. In line 10 I took it to mean that the tree hoped they would finish the day because the tree knew it would be the next to fall and its sister was the tree next to it looking at it in horror. The saw wanted “Dinner” and started cutting down the tree AKA like the boy. I feel like the hand symbolizes a tree. If you raise your hand, it looks like a tree with the lower arm and hand as the trunk and the fingers, because I thought that meant that if it stopped, the tree might survive. “Life turns upside down. Then the boy saw everything-(524). This was the saw that continued to cut deeper and deeper into the tree. The boy (tree) now knows that he is going to die and there is nothing he can do to stop it. “Don't let them cut off my hand-Don't let them sister (524)! The tree has now fallen and I think this is described as "he lay down and puffed out his lips with his breath (524)". I think this is the tree falling and everyone watching, including the other trees, until it comes to the complete fall to the ground and all the branches settle to the ground. A little less nothing, in line 30 I thought it meant that the small one was the first cut of the trunk, less was the almost complete cut and nothing was the tree fallen to the ground. Everything stops for that moment as in the poem. I think it is the loggers who make sure that no other trees are cut down along with the tree that has already fallen. Once they realize that no other trees will be cut down along with the one that just fell, they go back to work killing more trees. “They weren't the dead ones, going about their business