The setting of “The Gift Outright” is America, called simply “the land” (1). The speaker does not dwell on the physical character of of the landscape, but is concerned instead with the sacrifice the colonists made to the land in order to become American. In the course of that story, the American land expands in scope. While the speaker initially refers to the land as the colonies Massachusetts and Virginia in line 4, in the poem’s final lines the land is “vaguely realizing westward” (14) . The contours of this land thus shift with the historical moment described in the poem, as its physical boundaries did during the country’s early history. The poem ends on the image of the land lying to the west as being “unstoried, artless, unenhanced” (15), alluding to the physical development and myth-making that was to follow, as well as paying tribute to the simple beauty...