Nothing Gold Can Stay / Robert Frost



"Nothing Gold Can Stay" is a poem by Robert Frost. Written in 1923, this eight-line poem was published in the Yale Review in October of that year. It was later published in the collection New Hampshire (1923; copyright renewed 1951 ) that earned Frost the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

New Hampshire also included Frost's poems "Fire and Ice" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

Poem
Nothing Gold Can Stay Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

Reception
In 1953, Alfred R. Ferguson wrote "perhaps no single poem more fully embodies the ambiguous balance between paradisiac good and the paradoxically more fruitful human good than "Nothing Gold Can Stay," a poem in which the metaphors of Eden and the Fall cohere with the idea of felix culpa.

Six years later, John A. Rea, wrote about the poem's "alliterative symmetry", citing as examples the second line's "hardest - hue - hold" and the seventh's "dawn - down - day"; he also points out how the "stressed vowel nuclei also contribute strongly to the structure of the poem" since the back round diphthongs bind the lines of the poem's first quatrain together while the front rising diphthongs do the same for the last four lines.

In 1984, William H. Pritchard called the poem's "perfectly limpid, toneless assertion" an example of Frost demonstrating how "his excellence extended also to the shortest of figures", and fitting Frost's "later definition of poetry as a momentary stay against confusion."

In 1993, George F. Bagby wrote the poem "projects a fairly comprehensive vision of experience" in a typical but "extraordinarily compressed" example of synecdoche that "moves from a detail of vegetable growth to the history of human failure and suffering."

It was also mentioned in S.E. Hinton's novel, "The Outsiders" to represent the innocence of youth.

Influence on popular culture
The poem is featured in both the 1967 novel The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and the 1983 film adaptation.

Comedian Stephen Colbert listed Nothing Gold Can Stay as the first poem he had to memorize.