The poem’s title is a quotation from William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, citing Macbeth’s soliloquy upon hearing of his wife’s death (See: Literary Context). The title, then, immediately connotes death and tragedy, even as these elements become evident only about halfway through the poem.

The poem opens, “The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard” (Line 1). The immediate focus, even before the setting or the characters, is the machine. The speaker says it both “snarl[s]”—a sound evoking a threatening animal—and “rattle[s]”—the sound of a machine. The buzz saw is both animate and inanimate, both unpredictable and indifferent. These qualities give the machine a sense of danger.

The purpose of the buzz saw is to cut wood to provide fuel: It “made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood” (Line 2). This activity seems innocuous, but even the first line’s diction reinforces the sense of danger: The saw “make[s] dust” but merely “drop[s] stove-length sticks of wood,” as though its true purpose is to produce the dust and the fuel wood is a by-product. Dust is traditionally associated with death (“Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust”)—so while the people may use the saw to produce fuel, the machine itself produces death.