Strictly speaking Frost does not use personification at all in his poem "Out, Out - ." The saw in the poem has not been personified. Throughout the poem Frost uses only the impersonal pronoun 'it' to refer to the saw. Only if he had used the personal pronoun 'he' or 'she' it can be said that Frost has explicitly personified the saw.
What Frost has done is, he has merely attributed human characteristics to an inanimate object like the saw. The 'buzz saw' in the following lines takes on a human attribute - that is, it could understand the meaning of the word 'supper' just like the boy and leaped or seemed to leap out of the boy's hand:
the saw,
As if it meant to prove saws know what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap -
The technical term for the rhetorical device which Frost has used is known as 'Pathetic Fallacy.' The term 'Pathetic Fallacy' was first coined by the art critic John Ruskin (1819 - 1900) in his work "Modern Painters" (1856). Ruskin defines 'pathetic fallacy' as “to signify any description of inanimate natural objects that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations, and emotions."
The difference between 'personification' and 'pathetic fallacy' is subtle. In 'personification' the inanimate object virtually becomes a human being and it is represented by the personal pronouns 'he' or 'she.' In 'pathetic fallacy' the inanimate object merely takes on human qualities and is represented only by the impersonal pronoun 'it.'
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