And then is heard no more. It is a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. In each story, the survivors rapidly turn to their own affairs, as everyone must eventually, but the story in Frost's poem deserves the despairing speech more even than Macbeth does. It is clear that Lady Macbeth dies from the exhaustion and illness brought on by her guilt. Yet blame is highly prized as a provider of meaning for trouble, as our litigious age shows.
People turn to blame as a refuge from the helplessness of grief.
In this poem, however, blame provides not an answer, but a sense of desperation at a lack of answers. At the end, the poet seems to blame the family and doctor for turning to their affairs, but he turned to his too the composition of the poem just as readers of that poem will quickly turn to theirs. Even the boy hysterically imagines the doctor assuming blame for what has already been lost. Frost, who lost four of his five children before he himself died, was a frequent and much admired public reader of his own verse, but he thought this poem too cruel to read aloud. Part of the cruelty lies in the meaninglessness of a death that not blame nor even poetry can make meaningful.