National Identity

The central theme of “The Gift Outright” concerns national identity. The poem conceives national identity as quite literally belonging to one’s country. The poem introduces the connection between national identity and possession in its first few lines, figuring nationality through its use of the grammatical possessive: being “the land’s” (1) or “England’s” (5). The colonists possessed the land but remained “Possessed by” England (6), a pun meant to recall spiritual possession. This sense of the term establishes the need for the “salvation” (11) the Americans will find when they cast off their Englishness.

Frost also uses the notion of possession to evoke romantic love, describing the relation of the colonists to their land as a marriage that has so far lacked a self-sacrificial gift of love. Saying “She was ours” (3-4) in the colonies, the speaker alludes to the concept of marriage active in the eighteenth...