The Gift Outright

The poem is relatively short and expresses the feelings of Frost, making it a lyric. As Frost’s tone and diction aren’t clear-cut, the poem works as a riddle, and the ambiguous words become pieces that the reader must interpret. The poem also meets the criteria for the elegy genre, with Frost reflecting on America’s past as if it were a departed friend or family member.

Frost isn’t the speaker of the poem, as the speaker remains part of an ambiguous “we.” The plural pronoun indicates the speaker is talking for Americans, and “the land” (Line 1) is the United States of America. The context—Kennedy’s inauguration—supports the thesis that the speaker is American and is anointing themselves as a representative for other Americans. In other words, the speaker symbolizes the voice of the United States and its citizens. However, the speaker’s beliefs could push readers to separate themselves from the “we,” if they don’t agree with the poem’s message.

The title, “The Gift Outright,” indicates a central theme—The Positives and Negatives of Gifts—while also previewing the speaker’s subversive style. “Outright” means explicitly and directly, yet “the gift” isn’t as straightforward in meaning. In the poem, there are multiple gifts, and none of the gifts are indisputably positive.

From one angle, the land is the gift, destined for the Americans before they were Americans. Frost’s use of repetition supports this idea when the speaker states, “The land was ours before we were the land’s. / She was our land more than a hundred years before we were her people” (Lines 1-3). The word “land” appears three times, and, with the inauguration context, the reader knows that land symbolizes the territory that had become known as the United States of America. This repetition emphasizes the land’s importance and exposes its vulnerability. The “land” is constantly on display, liable to scrutiny and seizure.

The phrase “more than a hundred years” alludes to the first official colonies that appeared in the early 1600s. More than 100 years later, the colonists went to war with England, and the American Revolutionary War (1775-83) turned the “we” into “her people.” As the speaker uses the feminine pronoun for the United States, they use anthropomorphism, transforming the country into a woman. Thus, the gift isn’t only a nation, but a woman.

Another key theme is Mutability and Vulnerability. The speaker alludes to the colonies and Virginia and Massachusetts, and they reference England’s governance of the colonies when they state, “But we were England’s, still colonials” (Line 5). This suggests that like the land, Americans are fragile; the land has different owners, and so do the people. Thus, there is susceptibility amid change.

United States History and Paradoxes are a third central theme. The enigmatic diction and tone pair with repetition when the speaker states, “Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, / Possessed by what we now no more possessed” (Lines 6-7). The speaker doesn’t specify what the Americans had or didn’t have, and the repetition frustrates logic. The reader wonders how someone can possess something they don’t possess and how something can capture them that doesn’t capture them “no more.” This creates an apparent contradiction.

The idea of “possessing” returns to the theme of gifts. The land possessed the Americans, but England—not the Americans—maintained ownership, as England still had the gift. Once the Americans got the land, they remained detached from their gift and closer to England—though the territory was now officially independent from England.

The tone is rather critical, with the speaker chastising Americans for “withholding” (Line 8) from the land. Americans remain fragile or “weak” (Line 8), and they’re timid about how to bond themselves to their space—“land of living” (Line 10). They’re unsure about how to become one with the country and the gift that they now entirely possess. Once they “surrender,” they acquire “salvation” (Line 11). Now that the Americans are one with their country, they can give themselves “outright” (Line 12) to their gift and redeem it.

The motif of surrender animates the poem and bolsters the themes. The capacity to merge their identity with something else reveals the mutability and vulnerability of people. Surrender adds to the paradoxes in the United States history, as the poem subverts the trope of the mighty, forceful Americans by presenting them as passive. The Americans can’t do much on their own, and what they can accomplish occurs through becoming one with their land. Surrender is also a type of gift with positives and negatives; the positive is that the Americans gain their land, and the negative is that they lose their individual selfhood.

The speaker preserves the enigmatic tone with the cryptic line, “(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)” (Line 13). The word “gift” occurs once in the poem, and it's in a parenthetical. This suggests that the “gift” becomes something of an afterthought. As the speaker includes war in the parenthetical, war becomes an afterthought, too. The speaker nods toward the positives and negatives of gifts when they link war—a deadly, destructive humanmade event—to gifts.

In Critical Companion to Robert Frost, Deirdre Fagan criticizes the parenthetical mention of war, claiming, “[I]t comes off casually, as a sort of aside” (138). Fagan believes the speaker neglects the life-or-death importance of America’s myriad wars. From another angle, the speaker reflects general criticism of Americans: They’re not too concerned with foreign policy—the countries America wages war against and the countries that they help wage war. In the book-length essay Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 (New York Review of Books, 2003), the American writer Joan Didion argues Americans can’t have thoughtful discussions about war and foreign policy. Like Frost’s speaker, Didion uses the plural pronoun “we,” declaring, “We take cover. We wait for the entire subject to be defused, safely insulated behind baffles of invective and counterinvective” (26). In Frost’s poem, the parentheses represent the convenient concealment and distracting name-calling.

United States history and paradoxes continue when the speaker, alluding to “Manifest Destiny,” mentions Americans “vaguely realizing westward” (Line 14). In 1845, the term “Manifest Destiny” appeared in The Democratic Review, and the phrase speaks to Americans’ belief that their fate was to expand and create new states in the West and Midwest. In Frost’s poem, the steely myth becomes fragile—the expansion is ambiguous, not aggressively forthright.

The speaker remains enigmatic and contradictory. They claim America remains “unstoried, artless, unenhanced” (Line 15), but they have just told a story about the United States with art (poetry). Then again, maybe the speaker feels like they haven’t crafted an artful story, and they intentionally used an enigmatic tone and diction to prevent a legible narrative from forming. The repetition of “such as she” (Line 16) isn’t clear. The speaker might be saying the United States was sincere and natural, and it would “become” sincere and natural (Line 16). Yet if the United States was already sincere and natural, it would not need to become it. This suggests that the country would be more sincere and natural, but perhaps what makes the country this way is its paradoxes and fragmented perspectives.