The Gift Outright
Robert Frost was the first poet I really enjoyed while in school. That’s probably not surprising. Not being by nature inclined to poetry, I found that Frost’s lyricism – and his popularity – made him more accessible to me. So I, like many, many others, knew him through beloved poems like “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” (each of which will, no doubt, make appearances in this space in due course ☺).
This week, however, I’ve had on my mind the poem Frost read at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. Including a poet in the festivities was a first, and since then every Democrat president except Johnson has done so (and no Republicans; make of that what you will).
Kennedy had asked Frost to read “The Gift Outright,” a poem Frost described as “a history of the United States in a dozen lines of blank verse” (though the poem actually runs sixteen lines). Less lyrical than those I mentioned above, the poem holds notes of both the tempered hopefulness needed during the Depression (when Frost wrote it) and the more optimistic hopefulness that surrounded the youthful Kennedy’s inauguration.
But it also contains, I think, a profound lesson and truth buried amid the more celebratory tone in its middle lines, something that is more sober, realistic, and often elusive:
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Frost, I think, is reminding us that we cannot really possess anything that we are not willing to give ourselves completely to, and that the only place we will ever find redemption is in surrender. As we round the corner of another inauguration and look ahead to the impending Lenten journey to the cross, these are perhaps good lines to hear once again.
I won’t recount the enjoyable story of the events leading up to Frost’s invitation and his actual recitation, but I’ll put a link here to a wonderful article describing that, and I’ll place the recording of Frost’s recitation below.
“The Gift Outright”
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
Robert Frost, in The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems
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Check your history. This land was home to native nations for centuries before white Europeans invaded their shores. I would expect that kind of thinking from Robert Frost considering the culture back then, but while things have not improved greatly for “Native Americans”, repeating and glorifying those former thoughts only continue to ignore and continue the injustice they suffered and still experience.