Lines 28-34 Summary

Lines 28-32

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 to his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it. 

• The country doctor puts the boy under with ether, an old anesthetic. As his breathing slows, the person watching his heartbeat realizes that the boy's heart has stopped. 
• The speed with which the poem goes from operating room to death mirrors the speed with which the event took place. We see the boy slip away, from "little" to "less" to "nothing."
• Notice how it isn't the boy's mother, father, sister, or doctor watching his pulse. It's the "watcher." The term is almost an industrial one, like a night watchmen or guard.
• The sentences here are structured so that the reader winds down to the eventual conclusion of death in brief, half-line clauses.
• It's almost as though the poem's pulse is winding down with the boy's. 
• Again, notice how the boy's heart stopping doesn't mean "his life is over." The line could read, "That ended the boy's life," but it says, "That ended it," as though the boy were an object. He is simply a function of how much work he can do, not a full human being.

Lines 33-34

No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

• The phrase in line 34 is a curious one, but apt. The boy is tragically dead, but the phrase is one we might see at the end of a presentation, or the completion of a building, or the end of a debate. It implies that work has been invested in and is indivisible from the boy's essence. In that sense, "they" see the tragedy as simply an impassable impediment: there's no point in further investing in the boy. He is only as good as the work he does. 
• When you see the boy in this way, then there is nothing to do but move on. Death here only stops work. And since the work is what remains to be done, they abandon the memory of the boy. 
• So why end the poem on this callous note? Some read it as a commentary on the nature of death in an industrialized world, while others see it as a reading of the value of human life during WWI. We discuss those readings later (see, for example, "Themes: Death"), but it's important to remember that, in one simple sense, Frost is suggesting that the family is moving on because there is nothing else to do.