The Gift Outright

For the last few days, this poem's been running through my mind, for no good reason. Frost, who had written this poem years before, was to read it at JFK's inauguration. The bright light from the snow was blinding and Frost couldn't read, so he recited it from memory.

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

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What's always struck me was the line "Such as we were we gave ourselves outright," indicating that Frost wasn't saying so much about the great gift to us of the land, but was talking about the gift that we ourselves can give to land. It's such a lovely idea; to give yourself, outright, over to the health, the life, the needs of the land.