Robert Frost's The Gift Outright - Essay Example

The author used the word possessing what seemed to be unpossessed, as a sexual metaphor that is secretly related to sex. The citizens of America were not possessed since land ownership was illegal in England. Also, they did not give themselves to the land in a manner that shows the physical and spiritual union that love has always demanded. The idea was received in a varied way by the author when he said people were possessed by what they did not seem to treasure, meaning that they began involving themselves deeply. This was illegal before the foreigners who ruled the country at that time.

            In the poem “The Gift Outright” there was an effective performance moment when the author gave up on the intellectual and physical distances that are involved in the reading. Frost gazed out at the country and recited straight from his body the way things were. For this reason, the poem “The Gift Outright” insisted on the mystic connection between the world and the body. This is illustrated when he said that the land was for the people before people became the land. The words in that line are eminently tricky. Tricky in the sense that the author is celebrating the manifest destiny, but the history is maintained in a soft focus. After the beginning of America, the historic and political specifics faded into an elemental arrangement. The questions posed on who resided on the land and named them are sidestepped. There is an evasion in the Native American Name. For instance, the name Virginia is revealed as a lying European word. There are no defined names like the one mentioned above (Bosmajian, 95).

 The names are rhetorical that subside into the general ownership consideration. The land is portrayed as a female, making the other sex a corporate male that needs to be owned. The passage of historical moments gives way to possession of a sexualized geopolitical nation with only after and before. Frost, specified the gender relation between thought and love. In his thoughts, he symbolized love as female while thoughts were associated with males. During the original draft of the poem in 1913, the poem featured love and thought as female. The decision of Frost to change the thought gender to male is related to conventional gender associations. Typically, in the poem, women are associated with love and emotion while men on the other hand are associated with thought and rationality (Bosmajian, 95). When he suggested that love is triumphant over liberation, Frost is arguing that women are always victorious in sex battles.