Tuesday, November 22, 2011

A Poem for Thanksgiving

There are not as many great poems for Thanksgiving as there should be, because America's most talented poets have spent the last 100 years or so complaining about America. But, for all its problems, the United States was not as bad as Nazi Germany, and the years of World War II saw an upsurge of patriotism among America's intellectuals unlike anything that we've seen since.

One of those intellectuals was Robert Frost, who was 68 years old in 1942, when he wrote "The Gift Outright," one of his last great poems. In 1961, Mr. Frost was supposed to read a new poem he had written for the Kennedy inauguration. But it was a bright, sunny day in Washington, with snow all over the place. Dazzled by the sun and snow, Mr. Frost couldn't read his own manuscript. But like a real trouper, he saved the day by reciting this poem, which is better than the one he had written anyway.

Like many of Mr. Frost's poems, "The Gift Outright" appears to be very simple and straightforward on the surface while actually containing very subtle wordplay. Notice, for example, all of the different ways he plays with the concept of ownership and possession. It is a great work, and one that would have seemed even poignant to a country preparing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of its sons:

The Gift Outright, by Robert Frost

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.

3 comments:

  1. In colonial times, we had conquered the land ("the land was ours") but we still considered ourselves to be British ("we were England's"). Because we had not fully committed to the land, we were not all we could be ("Something we were withholding made us weak"). By devoting ourselves to the land, we freed ourselves from England. ("And forthwith found salvation in surrender.") Paying for the land -- in our blood -- made us worthy of it ("The deed of gift was many deeds of war.") Once we had truly paid for the land, we could start to fill it with our stories, our art, and our people -- and create the modern United States. ("Such as she was, such as she would become.")

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