of the play, the tragic hero is told of his wife’s death, and he utters the phrase, “Out, out, brief candle!” Frost alludes to the emotion Macbeth feels when he realizes life is short and uncertain.

In a single stanza, “Out, Out—” tells the tragic tale of a young boy who loses his life after severing a hand in a buzz saw accident. Advancing the theme of life and death, Frost foreshadows an impending tragedy. The omniscient narrator says,

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 poet also paints a grim picture of what can go wrong when human beings and machines share a relationship. The combination of man and machine can bring about an unexpected death, which reinforces Frost’s theme of the brevity and uncertainty of life.

Another literary device utilized by Frost is personification, which is a figure of speech giving human attributes to non-humans or inanimate objects. Describing the buzz saw, the narrator states:

And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,

As it ran light, or had to bear a load.

In another example, the narrator says:

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...

Of great significance to this poem is the reaction of the adults following the boy’s death. They appear to display little emotion at the loss, as if his life meant very little. Whereas Frost seemed sympathetic to the boy early in the poem by suggesting it might have been better for him to quit work early, he paints a scene as cold as a New England winter when “they,” without specificity, return to their daily tasks. This is a comment on human nature.

In the two-stanza poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” W.H. Auden also employs the literary device of allusion. The poem centers on the theme of tragedy and human suffering, which, like life itself, appears to be uncertain. To advance his message, the poet alludes to the paintings of great artists of the past:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting.

Auden alludes to one painting in particular: “The Fall of Icarus” by Pieter Brueghel. In the painting, Icarus, the son of Daedalus, falls into the sea when he flies too close to the sun, which melts the wax binding his wings. He uses the painting to evoke the same emotion over the loss of Icarus that he feels human beings should have for the suffering of others. In the second stanza of the poem, Auden describes the apathy people display when faced with the suffering of others. This is a similar theme to that which appears in Frost’s “Out, Out—.” In contrast to Frost, Auden does not use personification as a literary device, but like Frost, his message about how self-centered people seem to find the suffering of others irrelevant is powerful.

When tackling a question like this, sometimes the good old list-making method is your best friend! So, with that in mind, let's think about it this way:

Similarities

1. Both poems use a style which makes use of enjambment -- where an idea or sentence runs across from one line to the next without a break -- to emphasize the idea that the speaker is addressing the listener directly, almost conversationally.

2. Theme. The themes of the two poems are very similar. Auden contemplates the idea of "suffering" taking place under the most mundane of circumstances, when people are simply going about their daily business -- one can be simply "walking along" when something terrible happens to them. Likewise, in "Out, Out --" the boy is doing his ordinary daily work when tragedy strikes.

At the same time, both poets explore the idea that whoever is "not the one dead" (Frost) may be little affected by what is an enormous tragedy in someone else's life. Auden imagines those who may have seen Icarus falling simply "sailing calmly on" in their ship, because this was not their tragedy or their concern.

Both poems, then, express the idea that suffering can have an enormous impact on one person, without affecting those who are unconnected in any way at all.

3. Both poets also allude to "great masters", although Auden does this much more explicitly, referring to certain paintings, whereas Frost's title alludes to a speech from Shakespeare's Macbeth without exploring this within the poem itself.

Differences

1. Form. Especially when discussing poetry, it's important to think about the form the piece takes; in both cases here, obviously, the basic form is poetry, but where WH Auden's poem is written using a rhyme scheme, Frost's is in blank verse, meaning that it does not rhyme, but adheres generally to iambic pentameter.

2. The narrative voices differ somewhat in that Auden does not ever use an "I" statement, whereas Frost does. This relates to the fact that Frost's poem seems to relate an incident with which the speaker has personal experience, whereas Auden's poem is based upon old paintings and myths, and considers the issue from a more universal or detached perspective.

Both Robert Frost's "Out, Out—" and W. H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" deal with the theme of death; specifically that death, from a broad perspective, is simply a part of the way the world goes.

In "Out, Out—", Frost tells the story of a boy who, at the end of a work day, gets his hand caught in a buzz saw and dies as a result.

Throughout the poem, the narrator focuses on the sensory details of the scene, like the "sweet-scented" sawdust, the "sunset far into Vermont," and the way the buzz saw "snarled and rattled." When the narrator does share people's emotions, they're held at a distance. For instance, when the boy gets injured, he turns to the others in the yard with his arm up, "as if to keep the life from spilling." We're told he holds his hand up, but we're not told that "to keep the life from spilling" is his goal, only that his actions look "as if" it could be his goal.

Once the boy dies, the poem ends with one sentence: "And they, since they/Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs."

In "Musée des Beaux Arts," Auden describes Brughel's painting "The Fall of Icarus" in the second stanza to illustrate the narrator's musings about life and death in the first stanza.

The painting shows the Greek myth of Icarus at the moment when Icarus, having flown too close to the sun and melted his wax wings, meets his death by crashing into the sea. Rather than being the center of the image, however, Icarus is a tiny figure drowning in the corner; most of the painting is taken up by a pastoral scene featuring shepherds and other townspeople, none of whom even seem to realize Icarus is there.

The narrator in "Musée des Beaux Arts" has spent the first stanza musing on how suffering rarely takes front and center in human life; rather, even when someone is suffering the pangs of childbirth or death, "the dogs go on with their doggy life," children skate on ponds, and horses scratch themselves.

Likewise, in the second stanza, the narrator focuses on "how everything turns away/Quite leisurely from the disaster" depicted in Brueghel's painting. The narrator notes that while the ploughman seen in the painting may have heard Icarus crash into the water, "for him it was not an important failure."

Both poems focus on how the world goes on, even when someone dies. While death can be extremely portentous and meaningful to the person dying, for the rest of the universe, it means little or nothing. Others "are not the one dead," in Frost's words, and "the sun shone/As it had to," as Auden says.

Ethically, I cannot do this assignment for you, but I can point you in a couple directions to help. My advice would be to annotate and analyze each poem in isolation, then look for the connections between the two poems.

Ask yourself: What is each poem's theme? What is each poem saying about life? About individual suffering/pain/death? About the impact of an individual on society? About how society reacts to an individual? It begs the question, What does it matter if one individual suffers in context within the whole society?

Both Auden and Frost are showing in their respective poems the harsh reality of life. Both poets show an individual in pain, who suffers, and the reaction of those around the individual. In both poems, other who "witness" the suffering, both of the boy in "Out, Out—" and of Icarus in Auden's poem, turn away from the individual who suffers and move on with their own daily routines.

In doing this assignment, look also at the specific diction or word choices of each poet. Consider also the literary devices used by Auden and Frost. For example, each poet uses very strong imagery. Find an example in each and compare their meaning, purpose, and impact upon the entire poem.

The question suggests you should briefly describe the subjects of the poems before comparing and contrasting them. Robert Frost's "Out, Out—" tells the story of an accident with a buzz saw, in which a boy loses his hand, then dies. The poem is in blank verse and consists of a single stanza. W.H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" is in free verse and is slightly shorter than Frost's poem. It is divided into two stanzas, the first of which makes a general observation about how well the old Master painters understood suffering. The painters knew that, even at moments of passion and high drama, there were people and animals around who did not care what was going on and remained preoccupied with the minutiae of their own lives. In the second stanza, Auden uses the indifference of Brueghel's plowman in his painting, "The Fall of Icarus," to illustrate the point.

The two poems, therefore, are similar in that they describe the death of a boy, and in that those around the boy do not seem to be particularly perturbed or strongly affected by his death. Frost ends his poem with the words:

And they, since they

Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.