Dear Ali:
I am honored by your invitation to help you in raising funds for the International Rescue Committee, and delighted by your request for a favorite poem.
Notice that I referred to “a” favorite; that’s because I believe one can no more have a single favorite poem than your teachers can have a single favorite student. I love different poems for different reasons, in the same way that your teachers love you.
I’m sending you a copy of Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright” because it contains the elements I like best in Frost’s poetry: his use of clean, simple language and commonplace imagery to evoke powerful and complex ideas and emotions. Also, it describes some of the tensions that are part of our roles as Americans and our struggle for democracy.
My best wishes go to you and your classmates on this ambitious and imaginative publishing venture.
Sincerely,
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
