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

The narrator describes America’s history as a nation from the time of the European colonists. Although the colonists owned the land, they could not draw a national identity from it because they were still tied to England. They eventually realized that they were denying their beliefs in freedom and, by embracing the lessons of the land, were able to establish an American identity. In order to accept this gift of identity, the people had to commit many acts of war and mark the land as their own, but the end result was a truly American land.

The broad enthusiasm for America that characterizes the poem takes an unexpected turn in the grave thirteenth line: “(The dead of gift was many deeds of war.)” Suddenly, the poem is not only about a commitment to the land, but also a discussion of the Revolutionary War and remorse that the battle over the land caused so many deaths. The use of parentheses in this particular line ensures that the specifics of the war are not mentioned, but does insist that the memory of the war should not be forgotten or cast aside.

This poem is technically a sonnet, though unusual in this form because of its sixteen lines. It is written in iambic pentameter and free verse.

Carl Sandburg

Grass

Carl Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967) was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."

He spent most of his life in the Midwestbefore moving to North Carolina.

Much of Carl Sandburg's poetry, such as "Chicago", focused on Chicago, Illinois, where he spent time as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and the Day Book. His most famous description of the city is as "Hog Butcher for the World/Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat/Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler,/Stormy, Husky, Brawling, City of the Big Shoulders."

Grass

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them under and let me work—

I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

What place is this?

Where are we now?

I am the grass.

Let me work.

Nature—specifically grass—narrates the poem in first-person point of view. The words and repeated phrases suggest a sarcastic tone. Nature seems frustrated that humankind cannot learn from its mistakes and instead allows the grass simply to cover them up. People pay so little heed to their tragic errors of the past that they do not even recognize a battlefield site when they see it. ("What place is this? Where are we now?") Another interpretation suggests that the tone is objective and impassive: Grass has a job to do, and as surely as rivers flow and thunder rumbles, it does what it has to do.

The dominant figure of speech in the poem is personification, which turns the grass into a person who observes wars and cleans up after them. An implied metaphor equates grass with time, which erases memories of war. The battles referred to call up images of great carnage, as indicated in the following details about the battles

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