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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 American people.
(c) The wars fought to secure land.
(d) The history of the United States.

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

3. What is the implied antecedent of "our" and "we" in lines 1 and 2?
(a) Americans.
(b) Farmers.
(c) Revolutionaries.
(d) Colonists.

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) Epistrophe and chiasmus.
(c) Antithesis and oxymoron.
(d) Chiasmus and antithesis.

5. What does line 12 make clear is the "Gift" in the title "The Gift Outright"?
(a) Freedom from England.
(b) The land Americans live on.
(c) Surrender and salvation.
(d) Americans themselves.

Short Answer Questions

1. What technique is used in the phrase "unstoried, artless, unenhanced" (line 15)?

2. What is alluded to in the phrase "the land vaguely realizing westward" (line 14)?

3. What technique is used in the line "Such as she was, such as she would become" (line 16)?

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

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

Short Essay Questions

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

2. Explain the poem's title.

3. 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)?

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

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

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

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

(see the answer keys)

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