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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Section 1: "The Gift Outright," Lines 1-16.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What technique is used in line 10, "We were withholding from our land of living"?
(a) Alliteration.
(b) Metonymy.
(c) Paradox.
(d) Personification.

2. Which term most accurately describes the meter of "The Gift Outright"?
(a) Ballad meter.
(b) Free verse.
(c) Blank verse.
(d) Heroic verse.

3. What is alluded to in the phrase "the land vaguely realizing westward" (line 14)?
(a) The forced resettlement of Native peoples.
(b) The Westward expansion of the United States.
(c) The Louisiana Purchase.
(d) The American Civil War.

4. What technique is used in the phrase "unstoried, artless, unenhanced" (line 15)?
(a) Assonance.
(b) Apostrophe.
(c) Euphemism.
(d) Asyndeton.

5. Who is the author of "The Gift Outright"?
(a) Donald Hall.
(b) Galway Kinnell.
(c) Robert Lowell.
(d) Robert Frost.

Short Answer Questions

1. Which technique is used in the first line, "The land was ours before we were the land’s"?

2. To what event does the phrase "more than a hundred years/ Before we were her people" obliquely refer?

3. In line 15, what is the speaker calling "unstoried, artless, unenhanced"?

4. What is the antecedent of "it" in the phrase "it was ourselves" (line 9)?

5. According to the poem's second sentence, how did "we" find "salvation"?

(see the answer key)

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