The Gift Outright

BY ROBERT FRO ST

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.

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
E. E. Cummings - 1894-1962

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
who
a)s w(e loo)k
upnowgath
 PPEGORHRASS
eringint(o-
aThe):l
eA
!p:
S a
(r
rIvInG .gRrEaPsPhOs)
to
rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
,grasshopper;

a better understanding, the poem can be laid out in a more traditional way:

r-p-o-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
who as we look up now, gathering into a
The PPEGORHRASS
leaps, arriving
gRrEaPsPhOs
to become rearrangingly a
grasshopper.
Or it can be decoded:
“Grasshopper,
who
as we look
up now gathering
into the
leaps
arriving to
become arrangingly,
Grasshopper”
About Edward Estlin Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings was born in 1894 and died in 1962. He was an American poet, an
author, a playwright, an essayist, and a painter. E.E. Cummings lived to be 67 years old and
wrote a great number of texts, from poems to plays. He is said to be one of the great voices of the
20th century English Language. E.E. Cummings wrote more than 2900 poems, 2 novels,
published a great number of plays and essays, and made a lot of artwork. From age eight to
twenty-two, he wrote one poem per day. Also, Cummings was a pacifist. He rode an ambulance
in World War I instead of enlisting to fight. E.E. Cummings’ poetry conveys themes of love,
nature, and the relationship between the individual, the masses, and the world. He is also known
for having a satiric and humorous tone and for being controversial, not only with his visual
poems but with his erotic poems too. Cummings, his publishers, and others have echoed his
form of writing, his unconventional orthography, in his name and often write his name in
lowercase and without periods. However, scholars and publishers prefer to write his name in the
conventional way.