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• The following version of this poem was used to create this Lesson Plan: Frost, Robert. "The Gift Outright." Poetry Foundation. Web.

• "The Gift Outright" is 16 lines of blank verse, in a single stanza.

• In its opening lines, this poem asserts that the land that would become the United States of America belonged to the people who would become the American nation long before America was declared a nation separate from England.

• Frost opens with chiasmus, "The land was ours before we were the land's," implying that there is something contradictory--unnatural or unbalanced--in the colonists' relationship to the land (line 1).

• The land--that making up the original colonies--is depicted as feminine in lines 2-4, "She was our land more than a hundred years/ Before we were her people. She was ours/In Massachusetts, in Virginia."

• The unnatural situation of colonists is further developed in...

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