•It show up first as a flower, but doesn’t last long. Too much Frost for me. On the literal level, the reader knows that … Form and Meter. Explain how the poem relates to the key events in the novel. Enter your email address to subscribe to this site and receive notifications of new posts by email. Many of the critics utter that time plays a big role in this poem. The phrase ‘leaf subsides to leaf’ seems confusing. Then leaf subsides to leaf. Frost is well-known for using depictions of rural life to explore wider social and philosophical themes. A metaphor nevertheless, gold being that most precious thing, of most value. And of course, there’s a certain consolation in the fact that Frost’s choice of image to illustrate this sentiment – the fading of green spring leaves – effectively places one kind of ‘gold’ with another: the (metaphorical) ‘gold’ of the beautiful new leaves will give way to a literal gold in autumn, which is no less beautiful in its way than the green of springtime flowers. The leaf now transforms into a flower, that is, it represents the transient state of life, fleeting existence. One of the ten best American poems in my humble opinion. Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay. Nothing Gold Can Stay is a narrative poem because, it is a story about life itself. Dawn will always be a temporary state, it will slide away into day as surely as day will slide into night and so on and so forth. In Nothing Gold Can Stay the diction presented is extremely simple. “Nothing gold can stay” is the last line of the poem that is presenting the poet’s mind where he agrees to nature’s changing course. “Nothing Gold Can Stay” As a Representative of Mortality: This simple poem unfolds the idea of change and decay. Frost was a classicist after all, and much preferred to rhyme his lines. In just eight lines, Robert Frost (1874-1963) offers a fairly comprehensive view of the world, taking in the mutability of everything in it from the leaves on the trees to the purest good that existed in Eden before the Fall. “Stay gold” is a reference to the Robert Frost poem that Ponyboy recites to Johnny when the two hide out in the Windrixville Church. But although Frost’s poem is written in direct and accessible language, he conveys a great deal in just eight short lines, much as Blake was able to do in his short lyrics. Reply. That is some short life span. How do you get better at it? “Nothing Gold Can Stay” explicitly describes identical moments in three temporal cycles: the daily, the yearly, and the mythic. Nothing Gold Can Stay. Let's face it: the most beautiful things in life often have the least longevity. Meaning of 'Nothing Gold Can Stay' Even though 'Nothing Gold Can Stay' by Robert Frost is only eight lines long and seems simple, several readings … So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Robert Frost wrote Nothing Gold Can stay in 1923, just five years after World War I. But Frost’s choice of the auxiliary verb ‘can’ (rather than ‘will’, although many readers may misremember the title of the poem as ‘Nothing Gold Will Stay’) suggests that this is the way it’s meant to be: nature is not meant to be static. We often try to hold on to something or someone that is precious to us ("gold"), and many times we are not able to keep it. It isn’t? We begin with what reads like almost a paradox: ‘Nature’s first green is gold’. Having momentarily taken in the Biblical in this line, the focus of the penultimate line of ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ returns to the small: dawn ‘goes down’ to day, just as a green leaf subsides to a gold or brown one. It was published in a collection called New Hampshire the same year, which would later win the 1924 Pulitzer Prize. Why not some discussion of Locked up poetry as we are all in ‘Lock down’? Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Eden - how humans experience grief and shame. Her hardest hue - rich alliteration and a hint of personification as (Mother) Nature struggles to keep hold of this new fresh gold.