View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 7 short essay questions.

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 forced resettlement of Native peoples.
(b) The Louisiana Purchase.
(c) The American Civil War.
(d) The Westward expansion of the United States.

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

4. 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) Oxymoron and epistrophe.
(b) Antithesis and oxymoron.
(c) Chiasmus and antithesis.
(d) Epistrophe and chiasmus.

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

Short Answer Questions

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

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

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

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

5. Which is the primary definition of "still" being used in the expression "still colonials" in line 5?

Short Essay Questions

1. To whom is it implied the pronouns "our" and "we" refer in this poem?

2. Explain the poem's title.

3. Describe the form of "The Gift Outright."

4. What is implied by the diction the speaker uses to describe the lands yet to be conquered by American settlers: "unstoried, artless, unenhanced" (line 15)?

5. What does the speaker claim makes the colonists "weak," and what is the solution to this weakness (line 8)?

6. What does the speaker mean by "the land vaguely realizing westward" (line 14)?

7. Explain the synecdoche in line 4, "In Massachusetts, in Virginia."

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 620 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample