18 pages • 36 minutes read
Robert FrostThe Gift Outright
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1941A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Positives and Negatives of Gifts
Gifts are positive and negative in the poem. In the historical context, the gift of the land is a positive for the Americans or the colonists who benefit from turning the territory into an independent nation. The gift is a negative from enslaved Black people, Indigenous people, and people from the lower socioeconomic classes. For them, the gift leads to exploitation, brutality, death, war, displacement, or an impoverished status quo.
In a close reading of the poem, gifts remain positive and negative. First, the gift creates a burden, as the Americans must give themselves to their land. As the speaker notes, “Something we were withholding made us weak” (Line 8). The positive (the acquisition of land) comes with a negative or a catch: To fully utilize the gift that is the country, Americans must “surrender” (Line 11) their individuality and become one with the country. Put another way, Americans must sacrifice and act selflessly. They have to put the country's needs ahead of their pleasures, and relegating desires isn’t always pleasant.
Frost’s speaker explicitly links gifts to a negative when, in a parenthetical, they state, “(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)” (Line 13). The gift, an ostensibly good thing, created death and destruction. After the Revolution, wars didn’t stop, but rather continued. Americans kept battling Indigenous people, enslaving Black people, and waging war with other countries. As a result of the Mexican War (1846-48), the United States acquired several new territories, including Texas, New Mexico, and California. To please their gift, Americans must create violent conflict. The gift comes with lethal negatives.
There are other gifts in the poem. As the speaker refers to the land as a “she,” the United States becomes a woman, so a woman is a gift possessed by the Americans. As the Americans give themselves to the United States, they become a gift, and the “surrender” (Line 11) subverts gender norms, with the Americans yielding to the powerful nation/women. The relationship between the Americans and the country/women maintains the positives and negatives of gifts. The enigmatic tone and diction doesn’t make the bond appear outrightly healthy or wholesome.
Mutability and Vulnerability
Mutability and vulnerability pervade the poem, and the terms go together. Mutability means the tendency to change, and change reflects vulnerability. In the poem, people and nations don’t stay the same. They’re not implacable or invulnerable—instead, they shift and transform. At first, the people have the land, but they don’t have the land. The speaker admits, “[W]e were England’s, still colonials” (Line 5). Once they get the land, they’re timid about immersing themselves in the nation, with the speaker confessing, “Something we were withholding made us weak” (Line 8). To utilize the gift, the Americans must face mutability and “surrender” (Line 11) to their “land of living” (Line 10). After the Americans make themselves vulnerable and give up their individuality, they gain “salvation” (Line 11).
In a sense, the theme of mutability and vulnerability is positive. Through change and fragility, the Americans create another gift (themselves), which they give to their gift (the country) to advance its interests. Conversely, mutability and vulnerability are negatives. The tendency to change can work against a person—they can change into something bad. The same formula applies to vulnerability. Openness can make a person experience good, but it can also confront a person with harm.
The American’s mutability and vulnerability make them receptive to negative influences, as they must participate in the “many deeds of war” (Line 13). The wars circle back to America’s mutability and vulnerability. If America was already indomitable and impenetrable, people wouldn’t have to defend it or increase its power. The wars occur because America—“unstoried, artless, unenhanced” (Line 12)—can hypothetically become something else, and that something might not be a gift at all.
United States History and Paradoxes
The poem is often contradictory, leading to the theme of United States history and paradoxes. Frost presents his poem as a history of America, and, like America, the poem features incongruities. The speaker states, “The land was ours before we were the land’s” (Line 1). Yet if Americans don’t belong to the land, how does the land belong to them? Later, the speaker thinks through another paradox, “Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, / Possessed by what we now no more possessed” (Lines 6-7). If the Americans don't possess the land, how can it possess them? Conversely, if the land possesses them, how can they not possess it?
The poem generates several questions and possible readings, and, in the context of the theme, it replicates the divisive history of the United States. The country built on freedom and liberty brutally and lethally enslaved Black people, and it waged systematic war on the many tribes who belonged to the land before them. The Declaration of Independence (1776) declares,
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The paradox is that all people weren’t considered equal. The people in charge of the country didn’t care enough about the life, liberty, or happiness of the enslaved Black people, the Indigenous people, or the Americans from the lower socioeconomic classes.
Frost’s poem doesn’t mention life, liberty, or happiness. His speaker doesn’t perpetuate the belief that equity and inclusion were a part of the United States. The enigmatic tone and ambiguous diction don’t name the negatives, but they don’t excise them. The poem doesn’t feature many upbeat terms, so tending to the gift (America) isn’t a positive, happy enterprise. It requires sincere selflessness or “unstoried, artless, unenhanced” (Line 15) sacrifice.
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