1. Both the poems are based on true life incidents:
Frost's poem is based on a true incident which is believed to have happened in April 1915; Raymond Fitzgerald, the son of Frost’s friend and neighbour, lost his hand to a buzz saw and bled so profusely that he went into shock, and died of cardiac arrest in spite of the best efforts of the doctor. Frost’s title invites us to compare the poem’s shocking story with Macbeth’s speech on learning of his wife’s death:
The key to understanding the theme of Frost's "Out, out-" lies in the intertextual reference to Shakespeare's "Macbeth" Act V Sc.5, where Macbeth soliloquizes bitterly on the futility of life after he learns of the death of his wife:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Frost's poem ironically comments on the death of a small boy who dies tragically at such a young age because of an accident when he was sawing wood. His life is compared to a "brief candle."
Bette Wolf Duncan's poem deals with an incident which took place in the life of her late husband's grandmother. The mother in the poem is her husband's grandmother and the infant is her father-in-law.
2. Out door work: Frost's poem describes a group of people sawing wood. Bette Wolf Duncan's poem describes the mother engaged in agricultural operations:
Down below, with seeds and hoe,
Emma sowed the garden ground.
3. Children are at the center of both the poems. In Frost's poem it was a small boy and in Bette Wolf Duncan's poem it was a new born baby.
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