Robert Frost employs a number of different methods to express his thoughts regarding life and nature. The first being an allusion that he uses, the hyphen is inserted to include your own word. As the title is from Shakespeare's Macbeth with the line being "Out out brief candle", the "brief candle" symbolises life. Frost has applied the allusion to illustrate the boy exiting the real world.
Onomatopoeia has too been used within the poem. "The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard" allowing the reader to visualise the saw being used. The words "snarled and rattled" are brought into play once more to characterise the saw as a dangerous weapon. Personification is also employed in lines 14 and 15. "At the word, the saw, / as if to prove saws knew what supper meant." This makes the saw appear knowledgeable and that it knew what "supper" was.
Sibilance has been applied in line 3. "Sweet scented stuff when the breeze drew across it" generating olfactory imagery in the scattering of the scent in the breeze, this creates a harmonious effect.
Frost has used a figure of speech in the appearance of a metonymy. "As if to keep the life from spilling." The literal meaning is to keep the blood from spilling, the line tells us that the hand is bleeding and the boy's life is in danger.
Frost introduces a hyperbole to line 16. "Leaped out of the boys hand or seemed to leap." Obviously the saw has no limbs so does not have the capability to leap, but by overstating the point we can imagine the horror of the saw cutting into the boy's limb.
The poem also has a religious tone, line 14: "Supper" is a reference to the last supper which would also be the last supper that the family would eat before tragedy struck.
There is a conversational tone to the poem, "Call it a day, I wish they might have said." A ten monosyllabic line that is the first inclination that the poem is written in the first person as a narrative verse with a setting, a plot and conflict. In the same line Frost uses foreshadowing. Here, he is suggesting that something dark and sinister was coming.
The poem almost satirizes society's indifference at a child's death. The start of the poem is idealistic with the imagery of the scenery, the sunset and the "five mountain ranges". The nature in the poem appears perfect until the saw appears like a snake waiting to attack.
A caesura is used in line 32. "Little-less-nothing! and that ended it." The audible pause offers finality to the boys passing and after the tragedy the boy's relations continue with their lives as normal, as if nothing had happened. The poem is a narrative as if Frost witnessed it happening, written in blank verse as a continuous structure.
