This is the third iteration of my “In Memory” project, whose purpose is to spread awareness of memorization’s once fundamental role in education and self-actualization. Each week, for thirty weeks, I learn a poem by heart and share insights from before and after memorization. For more information on the context surrounding the project, you can read the introductory article, or watch this presentation I delivered at the 2026 Nationalist Media Conference.
THE POEM:
'Out, Out—’
By Robert Frost
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
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.
His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them ‘Supper.’ 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—
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.PRE-MEMORIZATION:
For this week, I wanted to memorize a tragic poem. My reasoning is something I discussed in my presentation at the Nationalist Media Conference. Modern tastes prefer happy endings, so it may seem strange to many that tragedy was once so popular in the West. Even Aristotle thought it odd enough to merit explanation, and in his analysis he determined that the negativity of tragedy helps to purge negative emotions from the audience. This is where we get the word “catharsis”, which in its literal sense means to purge or cleanse.
Perhaps more sensible to modern ears is the “Hurt Delay” theory of Angus Fletcher1, which basically states that exposing yourself to artificial negative stimuli (like Greek tragedy) may help your brain lay a sort of neural groundwork for processing similar negative circumstances in the future.
In light of these theories, I have begun to suspect that there is an evolutionary benefit to enjoying tragedy. By which I mean, human societies that did not enjoy tragedy, were less likely to survive. How much more beneficial, then, to amplify these effects by deep memorization of tragic material?
For this purpose, Robert Frost’s “Out, Out—” seemed like a perfect contender. It is the story of a boy killed in a freak accident, and of the underwhelming (but understandable) way his family responds to his death. It is very tragic. For my purposes, it might even have been too tragic.
POST-MEMORIZATION:
“Out, Out—” is written in a loose, non-rhyming iambic pentameter. Little ornamentations scattered throughout the poem help make it both more memorable and more pleasant: “Sweet-scented stuff…” (alliteration), and “Under the sunset…” (assonance). Frost sets up a rising sense of anticipation of the accident in the first part of the poem, climaxing with the incident itself halfway through, with all the follows dealing with the boy’s death. The greatest moment of the poem are its last lines, where the power of meter is paramount.
“No MORE to BUILD on THERE. And THEY, since THEY
Were NOT the ONE dead TURNED to THEIR afFAIRS.
Notice how “dead” occurs in the unstressed beat? It’s hard to actually say it that way. Just as it does in the poem as a whole, death occurs unexpectedly. And in line with the point the poem makes, the rhythm immediately returns to a more natural pattern with “turned to their affairs.”
Now, has memorization of this poem been “cathartic” for me? Has it prepared my brain to process catastrophe? That’s hard to say. I didn’t have the fortune of being so misfortunate this week. But in the process of memorizing the poem, it occurred to me that there is a crucial difference between the tragic story in this poem, and a theatrical tragedy. In the latter, the story exists to couch human misery in a meaningful narrative. The story in “Out, Out—” does the opposite. Everything from the five mountain ranges to his sister’s apron are mentioned for the sole purpose of cutting the ordinary short—of making the boy’s death seem even more pointless.
The death was accidental and blameless. There’s no takeaway, no lesson. There’s no “Well you shouldn’t have surprised your brother by saying supper so loud!” No. The point is people sometimes die for no reason at all. And the only sensible human response to this is to move on. It is the tragedy of all tragedies, and there may be nothing very cathartic about it at all.
Or so it seems. The jury is still out on this one. I will say, that having memorized the poem, I see myself vividly in the boy. I see myself making the same “rueful laugh”. I see myself swinging toward my family, holding up “the hand”. I see myself puffing out my last conscious breath as the doctor lays me down. And I see the world leaving me behind, turning to the affairs of the living.
There might be enough there. Enough so that, if some meaningless misfortune befalls me, the words of this poem might resurface, and offer comfort. I haven’t solved anything here. I don’t have an answer to the emptiness. But I do get the sense, having already memorized my lines, I just might slip more comfortably into a tragic role.
NEXT WEEK:
For next week, I will be memorizing Lord Byron’s “She Walks In Beauty”, the quintessential “tfw no goth gf” poem.
(article to be posted 8/2/26)
https://acrlog.org/2025/01/29/tell-me-about-despair-the-power-of-poetry-for-self-soothing/