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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 is the antecedent of "it" in the phrase "it was ourselves" (line 9)?
(a) "What we now no more possessed" (line 7).
(b) "Something we were withholding" (line 8).
(c) "Still colonials" (line 5).
(d) "What we still were unpossessed by" (line 6).

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

3. What techniques are used in the lines "Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,/ Possessed by what we now no more possessed" (lines 6-7)?
(a) Epistrophe and chiasmus.
(b) Oxymoron and epistrophe.
(c) Antithesis and oxymoron.
(d) Chiasmus and antithesis.

4. Which technique is used in the first line, "The land was ours before we were the land’s"?
(a) Chiasmus.
(b) Anaphora.
(c) Euphemism.
(d) Allegory.

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

Short Answer Questions

1. What techniques are used in the lines "She was ours/ In Massachusetts, in Virginia" (lines 3-4)?

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

3. What technique is used in the lines "She was our land more than a hundred years/ Before we were her people" (lines 2-3)?

4. What does line 12 make clear is the "Gift" in the title "The Gift Outright"?

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

(see the answer key)

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