The Speaker

The unnamed speaker “we” of “The Gift Outright” is an omniscient narrator who uses the sweeping first-person plural to speak for Americans across time. Like a historian, the speaker looks back in time, describing the period “Before we were [America's] people” (3) and also what the country would “become” (16). The voice focuses on the action of the story at hand rather than on its subjective experience of it. At times, the voice can be read as a lover, figuring the American land as female and describing the relationship between the “we” and that “she” in traditional metaphors of romantic love.

The Land

The American land can be considered the second character in “The Gift Outright,” which uses the humanizing female pronoun “she” to refer to the country. In the poem, the land is an entity that can be possessed by living on it. However, in order to find...