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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. In line 15, what is the speaker calling "unstoried, artless, unenhanced"?
(a) The American land.
(b) The history of the United States.
(c) The wars fought to secure land.
(d) The American people.

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

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) Chiasmus and antithesis.
(c) Oxymoron and epistrophe.
(d) Antithesis and oxymoron.

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

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

Short Answer Questions

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

2. What technique is used in line 10, "We were withholding from our land of living"?

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

4. The repetition of the word "deed" in line 13 is an example of which technique?

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

(see the answer key)

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