The Gift Outright by Robert Frost - Critical Appreciation

Give an estimate of Robert Frost as a poet and give a critical appreciation of the poem "The Gift Outright"? 

The Gift Outright: Frost was always, as any textbook will confirm, a regional poet; and his region was New England, more particularly New Hampshire, "one of the two best states in the Union '', the other being Vermont.

He hardly sang of the entire States, as Whitman did. Though he pitied his characters bound to the down-swing of a declining economy, he did not wish to alter their lives, and never dreamed of Utopia as Linchay did when he saw visions of his Springfield redeemed and spiritualized. Unlike Master and William Faulkner, Frost never sought to bring his characters into a regional unity.

The men and women of his poems are isolated, like their farms and wood lots, or they are caught in a net which tragically or ironically encloses at most the fate of only two or three. His regionalism resembles that of Emily Dickinson and Sarah Orne Jewett. It gave him a place to stand where he could see what was close by in a field or cellar hole, and, as well, a clear view above his hills to the "further range" beyond. 

A Metaphysical Poet : 

Frost is not a religious poet, not even a Nature mystic in spite of all that Nature meant to him. Frost is a metaphysical poet in the tradition of Emerson and Emily Dickinson, with all that the term implies of the poet's desire to go beyond the seen to the unseen, but his imagery is less involved than that of the older metaphysical.

Most of his poems fix on the mysterious moment when the two planes cross. As in all great metaphysical- poetry, the tension increases between the simple fact and the mystery which surrounds it, until the total meaning flashes in the final words. As one critic has observed, Frost's poetic art consists in "his careful and deliberate laying of the material for a poetic

bonfire". Frost confessed that poetry to him was essential -112andramatic. Whatever his theme maybe, he works to dramatize it for the reader, be it the tragedy of the hired man or the relation of the boy "too far from town to learn baseball" to the heaven flung birches which he, one by one, subdues, The most dramatic moment in a Frost poem is the kind of anagnorisis or denouement when the mundane fact achieves its full metaphysical significance.

His Pastoral Poetry : 

Frost's verse is in the great tradition of pastoral poetry from Theocritus to Wordsworth, though his pastoralism is never, like Virgil's Milton's decorative or political. He is a learned poet, but, as in Houseman's poetry, his learning is muted to "an echoic beauty". It was not the partisan of his ploughmen, mowers, hired men, gatherers of huckleberries and tree gum, for all his sympathy with them and his gift of psychological penetration into their lives. It looked on them with a detachment that was ironic, humorous, or ruthful. He made of their toil and defeat what they would never have imagined for themselves. 

His Realistic Views: Frost was not an ignorant or impulsive poet altogether. He had full information about what had already happened in the world of poetry. Thus, he says, "Poetry.. was tried without punctuation. It was tried without capital letters. He was tried without any image but those to the eye... It was tried without phrase, epigram, coherence, logic and consistency. It was tried without ability ..

He was tried without feeling or sentiment .. means to a poet. The sources of these experimental techniques were also numerous: the English metaphysical poets of the 17th century, the Symbolists of France, the "radical" American poets of the 19th century, and others. Frost, like many other poets of his day, rebelled against older techniques 

(1) against the older ideas about the "seriousness" proper to poetry, 
(2) against conventional verification, and 
(3) against conventional "poetic" diction. Aiming to do away with these older practices, Frost introduced into his poetry the touch of "seriousness", the new Frost knew what 'ability techniques of verse-writing in which "the sound of the sense" and metaphorical expression predominated, and also "the talk of New Hampshire farmers." 

Frost As a Natural Poet:

Frost was, above all, a Nature poet. But, again, he was not a Nature-mystic, as Wordsworth was, In his early verse one feels the joy in sensuous pleasure that Nature has given most modern poets, but Frost always knew where to find the line which separates Nature from Man. When tired of trees he sought again mankind; but if by noon he had too much of men, he could turn on to his farm and smell the earth and look into the crater of the ant.

In his earliest poems, Nature and Man confront each offer across the wall, as the buck and the doc in Two Look at Two face the wandering man and woman, each pair in its own pasture. Though Nature watches Man, she takes no account of him. On the slope where a dozen boys and girls once played, the trees are grown again in the mountain's lap.

Deep in the frozen swamp, Nature is taking back to herself, with the slow smokeless burning of decay, the cordwood meant for a useful fireplace. This is Nature's way: moving at a slower pace than Man, destroying his puny work for her own ends to provide the manure for new growth.

Man requires Nature, though he should never make the mistake of crossing the wall into her pasture. The woods are lovely, dark and deep against the snowfall, a place to linger and forget duty but to linger only, and not to stay. Man is most himself when he measures himself against Nature's pace and the barriers she places before him: Well, the storm. That says I must go on. That wants me as a war might if it came to Ash any man 

Robert Frost Style : 

Frost stuck to conventional metrical forms in the excitement over free verse. He complicated his problem (and enriched his verse) by setting the traditional metres against the natural rhythms of his speaker's sentences. The spoken word and the verse pattern must fight out the issue between them.

But the struggle when supervised by a skilled poet will end in reconciliation, As Frost said: "Meter has to do with beat, and sound posture has a definite relation as an alternate tone between the beats. The two are one in creation but separate in analysis.

The reader can easily see that the kind of poetry born of Frost's aim would be far from a simple imitation of the New England farmer's speech. At its best, it would be extremely complex though always seeming to be simple, and capable of carrying a variety of tones, ironies, and emotional gradations.

The conversational tone and the dramatic manners of Frost's poetry strike us first. More than a second glance is needed to appreciate his expertise as a prosodist. He handles, as few modern poets except Yeats and Auden have done, a great number of English metres. More remarkable still is what he makes of the "strict iambic" and the "loose iambic" in which most of his verse is written.

One would not have supposed there was so much blood-pulse left in this old meter in which English rhythms most characteristic Caley flow. Though he was one of the "new" poets. Frost worked his revolution in the surest way. "It's knowing what to do with things that count." For a poet, the only things he has to master are rhythm, sound, and sense.

This poem is deeply patriotic, as R. Jarrell thinks. It is one of the best patriotic poems ever written about America and the American people. For its deep love of the land, John F. Kennedy was drawn to it. Frost was the special invitee to read this good, great poem, though short in size, at his Inauguration. The great quality of this poem is that it expresses much in a short compass.

It does not become lavish in praise of the country, in fewest words, poetic indeed as it is, Frost succeeds in raising the poem to the stature of a national anthem. Here's a poetry reading which every American heart will be glad and every American bosom will be swollen with pride.

The very beginning sets the tone of the poem:

The land was ours we were the land's ..... ·... And then, She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. The great ideal of love for the nation and of selfless devotion to the motherland has been expressed in the following :

Possessing what we still were unpossessed by. Possessed by what we now no longer possess. In these lines, we also have a very good example of an expanded pun on 'possession' and deep feeling, as has been noted by Brower, that famous critic of Frost. Robert Frost also considered highly of the present poem. As Reginald Cook reports, Frost's comment on this poem was "It's the whole story.

It's all my politics. my national .... .·.. history." "National History", no doubt, it is, but as regards its 'polities'. It is not a political propagańda. It is a poem first, and political propaganda or anything else later. This is the burden of the remark of Reuben A. Brower:

That Frost was making a poem, and not a National Monument when he wrote it, is clear from his remark after an early reading, that it was a 'nice piece of blank verse. Although he has called it a 'narrative' and a history of the United States in sixteen lines', The Gift Outright is better described as a poetic definition of an American state of mind, a compact psychological essay on colonialism.

What is remarkable is how the necessities of definition become the vehicle of poetry, bringing the sense of musical delight not as something additional to statement, but as beautifully inevitable. Contradictions that run deep in our history and in our national mind of being American in the feeling that we also belong to the country our ancestors came from are imaged in contradictions of poetry.

The Gift Outright is the greatest of Robert Frost's patriotic poems. It is one of the finest lyrics of the American poet. The poem was read by Frost before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at William and Mary College, on December 5, 1941. Then it appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review in 1942. Finally, the poem was published in Frost's collection of poems entitled "A Witness Tree" (1942).

The American President John F Kennedy liked the poem so much that he invited Robert Frost to read this poem at the time of his inaugural ceremony in 1961. Referring to the greatness of this short poem, Randall Jarrell comments: "The Gift Outright is the best patriotic poem ever written about our own country (U.S.A.)." Frost himself regarded the poem as "a nice piece of the blank verse", and called it “a history of the United States in sixteen lines''.

According to the poet, "It is all my politics my national history." Yet another critic says that in The Gift Outright" the love of country is not expressed in screaming of hysterical flag-waving, but in the salvation of faith, in surrender to the land." 

The Theme of the Poem

The Gift Outright deals with the history of colonization in America. It describes the struggle of the American people against foreign rule. Moreover, it traces their identification with their own country through self-surrender.

The poem clarifies that patriotism does not mean shouting slogans and flag-waving. On the contrary, it lies in the love of people for their motherland and their devotion to her. Just like India, America was a British colony before getting freedom. The British colonists ruled over America for more than a hundred years. They occupied America as colonials.

And though they regarded her as their colony, they did not identify themselves with the country which they occupied. They still considered England to be their motherland. They thought that America was only their property, so they had no emotional attachment to her. Their only aim was to exploit America for their profit.

They did not have a patriotic feeling for America. They did not feel that they belonged to her and were her sons: Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessing what we now no more possessed. However, gradually they began to love America and regard her as their motherland. They surrendered themselves to her completely. 

Development of Thought 

America was already in existence before the British colonists, who later became Americans, arrived there and settled down finally. Before they came to regard her as their motherland, they treated America as a British colony for more than a hundred years. Soon after their arrival in America, they occupied the cities like Massachusetts and Virginia.

They began to live there, but they regarded America merely as their colony, to be exploited and not to be loved. At heart, they were still Britishers and considered England to be their motherland. They possessed America but did not feel that they belonged to her. They were still thinking of themselves to be the citizens of England which, in fact, was their country no more. They lived in America, but they withheld from her their love and affection.

This lack of patriotism for the country in which they lived made them mentally weak and hollow. However, with time, they gradually began to love their new country. Then they devoted their hearts and souls to the service of America. Now they were Britishers no more, but Americans in the real sense. It was this surrender to the noble ideal of patriotism that inspired them to fight courageously for the freedom of their motherland.

Their fight was against none but England from where they had come about a hundred years ago. This was their gift outright to their motherland which had just begun to identify itself with the Western world. But then their country was without a written history. She was without arts and literature of her own. Moreover, poets had not yet sung of her glory in exaggerated words in their poems. She was such an undeveloped country at that time, yet they loved her. And, they would continue to love her even if she develops and becomes different in future.

The Title of the Poem 

The title of the poem, The Gift Outright, is quite appropriate and very suggestive. The Britishers came to America and captured it as their colony. Their only motive was to exploit her physically for their monetary profit. They had a sense of possession, but not of belongingness. However, over time (about, one hundred years) they came to love the land and surrendered themselves to it. Now, this was a kind of gift from them to their new place of living, .c. America. Their complete surrender to the country encouraged them to wage a war of independence without caring for their own lives: Such as we were, we gave ourselves outright 

(The deed of gift was many deeds of war) 

To the land vaguely realizing westward... 

Artistic Qualities: Diction and Verification

The Gift Outright is a very compact but fascinating poem. It consists of just sixteen lines, yet the economy with which Frost has drawn the picture of his country before and after independence is praiseworthy. The real charm of the poem lies in its compression and precision. The poem is written in a simple and unsophisticated style which offers no difficulty to the reader. This is perhaps the greatest reason behind the poem's immense popularity in and outside America. It has a subdued and controlled movement. The language employed by Frost is extraordinarily lucid. The lines of the poem have the natural flow of common speech, yet they impress us: 

The land was ours before we were the lands. 
She was our land more than a hundred years 

Before we were her people. The above lines are also remarkable for their playful use of pronouns. In the lines that follow, we have a very striking use of the pun of the word 'possess': 

Possessing what we were still unpossessed by, 
Possessed by what we now no more possessed... 

In short, Frost's language in the poem has a rare smoothness, force and sublimity. The communication is direct without any interruptions and breaks. The poet's words in the poem are carefully chosen both with reference to their sense and their sound. The Gift Outright is written in the traditional blank verse. The lines of the poem are in iambic pentameter. It means that in each line we have five feet of two syllables each. The first syllable of each foot is unstressed, and the second is stressed. Here is an example from the poem: But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become. The poem's blank verse has amazing flexibility. 

Conclusion: The Poem's Greatness.

Frost's treatment of the theme of patriotism in The Gift Outright has raised the poem to the level of a national anthem. The poem contains in itself, in the fewest words possible, the glorious history of the American struggle for freedom. In his book, The Poetry of Robert Frost, Reuben. A. Brower observes as follows: That Frost was making a poem, and not a National Monument when he wrote it, is clear from his remark after an early reading, that it was a 'nice piece of blank verse'.

Although he has called it a 'narrative' and a history of the United States in sixteen lines, The Gift Outright' is better described as a poetic definition of an American state of mind, a compact psychological essay on colonialism. What is remarkable is how the necessities of definition become the vehicle of poetry, bringing the sense of musical delight not as something additional to the statement, but as beautiful and inevitable.

Contradictions that run deep in our history and in our national mind of being American the feeling that we also belong to the country our ancestors came from--are imaged in contradictions of poetry. To conclude, we may say that the Gift Outright will never be read by the Americans as a grand expression of their high sense of national pride. Moreover, the international community can seek inspiration from it to struggle for the achievement of freedom of all kinds. Such is the greatness of the poem! 

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