The Gift Poem
The Gift Poem - In southwest Michigan, the Brandywine Community School District school board recently switched from a liberal majority to a conservative majority in local elections. The new members had expressed their intention to limit how teachers could address issues including race, racism and other important issues, prompting hundreds of alumni, teachers, former administrators and others to join the opposition.
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The Gift Poem
Opposition members have appeared at school board meetings advocating for changes that would limit students. A graduate of Brandywine High School of Vocal, Diane Seuss is an American poet and educator whose book Frank: The Sonnet won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
Seuss grew up in Michigan and attended public schools, later attending Kalamazoo College, where she earned a bachelor's degree, and Western Michigan University, where she earned a master's degree in social work. He returned to Kalamazoo in 1988 to teach English, a position he held until 2016.
He has been a visiting professor at the University of Michigan and Washington University in St. Louis. In 2021, he received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Below is an open letter Seuss wrote to the school board about her experiences at Brandywine High School, asking them to consider imposing restrictive learning policies.
Poem Meaning
The Perfect Gift" is a poem by Robert Frost written in the 1930s but not published until 1942. The poem had a strange afterlife nearly twenty years later, at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, and everything was under the sun. But before we get to that, it might be worth summarizing what "perfect gift" means and offering a few words of analysis.
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You can read the poem here. Robert Frost once described the perfect gift as the history of the United States, and this poem begins: The land "was ours before we were land" because even before that the land of the United States had been claimed by Americans.
There was a "United States". To emphasize his point, Frost mentions Massachusetts and Virginia, two of the original thirteen colonies that existed before the American Revolutionary War and the subsequent founding of the United States of America. This is why America was "our land" more than a century before "we were its people": before he and his countrymen were "the people of the United States of America," the land that became known as the United States belonged to it.
Americans. But, of course, there was a problem: although Americans at the time felt a sense of belonging, they were technically British subjects: "still colonists" from the Old World, living under the colonial rule of the British (in full: it was Britain, and not only England, against which the Americans fought the War of Independence).
Figurative Language
The phrase "to have what we did not yet possess" establishes this strange sense of belonging in a land that was both American and un-American (still in British possession). Frost goes on to say that this meant that the Americans held something back until they declared their independence from Britain.
And what they clung to was themselves, which Americans clung to in the land they loved. One way to think about it is like marriage: a man can love a woman (and feel that he belongs to her), and yet she can feel that she is holding something back from him until "
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announce the announcement. Or the ultimate commitment, and put a ring on it. However, Frost uses the language of religion ("salvation") and war ("surrender") in line 11 of "The Perfect Gift": Ironically, the Americans "surrendered" on their own soil, and in America's time they triumphed over the British.
achieved revolutionary war In the last five lines of the poem, the meaning of the poem's title, "The Complete Gift," is made clear: Americans "at last," unhesitatingly, unhesitatingly, and unconditionally, went to war for their nation (before "their nation" even more than an idea there was promising).
Stanza Two
Drawing on the now legal language ("deed of gift"), Frost once again combines this with military language ("acts of war"): the way Americans gifted something to the land they loved, by going to war to fight for her. Was. . And even after the Revolutionary War, the United States continued to expand westward.
But Frost looks to the future in the closing lines of The Gift Outright, arguing that the United States, as a new nation at the end of the eighteenth century, had no set of stories or cultural traditions to anchor it, and that all Ahead was "the perfect gift" written in blank verse: five bars without rhyme.
This means that there are (usually) ten syllables per line, with the syllables arranged in five metrical feet, in this case iambs, which form an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. For example, in the first line: "Earth was ours, before we were earth."
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Frost liked to use blank verse in his poetry: as it is close to the rhythm of regular human speech in English, it reflects his conversational and homely style. Here, too, it matches the poem's somewhat blasphemous, patriotic force: note above how both mentions of the word "land" in that opening line of "a perfect gift" fall on stressed syllables, as does "we."
Stanza Three
Frost says that America, the "land of the free" belongs to us Americans. This rhetorical sense of "the perfect gift" makes it an interesting poem to compare with other 20th-century poems about the United States, e.g. e. Cummings "of course next to Mr. America i".
However, while Cummings is satirizing a public speaker proclaiming his patriotic feelings for America, Frost's pride in the land of the free is sincere and unnatural. However, this quality of poetry gave it new life in the early 1960s, just a few years before Frost's death.
Robert Frost was invited to read a poem at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. However, as he prepared to recite a poem he had written especially for the occasion, "For the Inauguration of John F. Kennedy," Frost found that he was unable to read the words of his poem on paper, the sun was so bright.
So, instead, he began reciting one of his earlier poems, from memory: "The Perfect Gift." Most critics agree that "The Perfect Gift" is a superior poem to the inaugural poem that Frost wrote, and "The Perfect Gift" is now more or less synonymous with Kennedy's inauguration.
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