POETRY Meaning HELP! please!!?

N

Nene

New member
~ 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.

Maybe im making this way too hard than it really is. but ive been trying to thing of something for the past 20 min.. can someone please help me figure out what the mesaage of the poem is?!?

thanks
ok i knew it was talking about america and how it became.
but is there a deeper meaning - like is it a metaphor for something else?

btw thanks [ "guesscuzimnottellin"] for helping me understand the lines i didnt understand before.
 
the message is about america- even when the land was actually controlled by the british through the colonies, the land has always been ours. here's a breakdown:

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,

(all these lines are about the fact that although the land didn't technically belong to the "americans" (they weren't actually americans then) we have had a special connection with the land; we were the first to build cities, towns, etc, if you don;t count the Native Americans that is)

Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.

(we "possessed the land but we felt the land couldn't "possess" us and be a part of us until it was actually ours.)

Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,

(we were withholding from our land, america, cuz she didn't actually belong to us. we were weak because we lived here only by england's decision; we were not yuet our own people)

And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)

(we fought england)

To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,

(This is talking about the still-unexplored west; the colonials had pretty much been confined to by the atlantic ocean and now we have ALL this land; it has a story waiting to be told and we, americans, wil be the ones who tell it)

Such as she was, such as she would become.


Anyway hope this helped :)
 
Back
Top