Tuesday Poem: “The Gift Outright” by Robert Frost
The Gift Outright
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become
by Robert Frost
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Poet & Poem: A four-time Pulitzer Prize winning American poet, teacher and lecturer, Robert Frost is one of America’s best-known poets, and his work has remained popular since his death in 1963. For John F Kennedy’s inauguration as President of the United States Robert Frost wrote a new poem titled Dedication. But—so the story goes—the 87 year-old poet couldn’t see the words because of the sun’s glare on the bright but cold, January inauguration day. So he recited The Gift Outright from memory instead.
I have always liked the way The Gift Outright speaks to our colonial relationship with environment, although I have also always felt that the lines “To the land vaguely realizing westward // But still unstoried …” in themselves epitomize colonialism, because of course the American Indians already had many stories—the colonists just didn’t know them. Although if you take the lines as simply meaning that the colonists as yet have no stories tied to the new land, then that interpretation fits with the rest of the poem.
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