by Stella Mcintyre

Created on: April 20, 2009

Nothing Gold Can Stay is amongst Robert Frost's most popular of poems as evidenced by its frequent mentions in popular culture. The poem is quoted in S.E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders and also in the lyrics of popular songs. The poem on first reading seems elegiac. Frost appears, on the surface, to be mourning the ephemeral beauty of spring and dawn. I would suggest, however, that the poem celebrates transient beauty in the style of Keats in Ode to a Grecian Urn.

Frost's immersion in the natural world of New England allows him to minutely describe the colors of both spring and dawn. The paradoxical metaphor "green is gold" of the first line becomes less of a paradox if you've ever experienced the first flush of foliage on the willow and birch trees of New England; they shimmer gold before turning green.

The second paradox in the poem "Her early leafs a flower" can also be explained. The early unfurling leaf resembles a flower but as the foliage develops the leaves become just leaves.

Frost takes his minute observations of the natural world and turns them into an exploration of something much deeper. In this instance that exploration is of a Felix culpa meaning "blessed fault" or "fortunate fall". The first version of the poem written in 1920 was much longer and there was no mention of Eden. The version that was published in October 1923 is the version that we read today. The addition of the line "So Eden sank to grief" turns the seeming diminishments in the poem into a "blessed fault". Although the verbs "subside" and "sank" would seem to be negative in tone, Frost is saying that it is in the transience of the moment that real beauty can be found.

From the three eight line stanzas of the first version, Frost has created a tightly written eight line poem of regular rhyming couplets in iambic triameter. The abundant alliteration drops softly when read aloud. The repetition of sibilants (So Eden sank) and aspirants (Her hardest hue to hold) create a sense of hushed awe. The poem is heavily end-stopped, with punctuation at the end of every line, to recreate a feeling of the briefness of the events being described; a feeling of things ending.

It is easy then to read a sense of grief and regret at the loss of so much beauty; that ultimately "dawn goes down to day" and Adam's fall from Paradise occurred. But Frost is, I would suggest, celebrating the cycle of life that this falling creates. Without the fall from Paradise Adam and Eve would have remained immortal, without pain or struggle. Just as dawn and spring are made beautiful by their ephemeral nature, so the life of man is also enhanced by its fleetingness.

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