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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 7 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

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

2. Who is the author of "The Gift Outright"?

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

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

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

Short Essay Questions

1. Explain the poem's title.

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

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

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

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

How do chiasmus and parallelism support the tone of "The Gift Outright"? Do they serve other purposes, such as creating emphasis or clarifying the relationships among ideas? Write an essay in which you describe how these two techniques are used in the poem and analyze how they contribute to both tone and meaning. Support your assertions with both quoted and paraphrased evidence from the poem; cite all borrowed language in MLA format.

Essay Topic 2

What were Frost's views on America and its history? Does biographical information about his beliefs tend to support or undermine the conclusion that he understood the cost of nation-building and found it an acceptable price to pay to create the United States? Do some research into Frost's background, intellectual history, and political beliefs. Then, write an essay in which you use this research to shed light on the meaning of "The Gift Outright." Support your assertions with evidence drawn from your research and from Frost's poem; cite all sources in MLA format.

Essay Topic 3

What other patriotic poems have you read or heard? Do these, like "The Gift Outright," skirt past painful facts in order to celebrate a nation's achievements? Are there patriotic poems that are able to acknowledge a nation's faults, or would this make them no longer "patriotic"? Choose a poem that is widely considered to be "patriotic" and compare it to "The Gift Outright," analyzing the extent to which either poem is able to present a balanced and realistic picture of the nation it celebrates. In your conclusion, comment on the purposes of patriotic poetry and whether "balance" and "realism" are desirable qualities in this genre of poetry. Support your assertions with evidence from both poems, and cite all sources in MLA format.

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