A belated post for Independence Day

I did not post anything on Independence Day. Partially because I spent most of the day away from the computer with my family, and partially because my thoughts on the Declaration of Independence are complicated. But I found the following poem by Robert Frost and thought it said something important about my native country, the land that I love, these United States.

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.

A tip of the hat to the Faith & Reason Institute's new web-journal, The Catholic Thing.