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

                 -Robert Frost (1923)



"The movement of the poem is both simple and richly evocative. Viewed as a nature poem, "Nothing Gold Can Stay" presents the moment in early spring when the vegetative world is first breaking into blossom. In the first four lines, Frost's imagery quite literally describes how new leaves emerge as yellow or golden blossom before they develop into green leaves. "Her early leaf's a flower," the speaker observes. This period of blossom, however, is very brief. "But only so an hour," the speaker then immediately qualifies. If the first three lines depict a world of rich beauty, the poem pivots decisively on line four.

The second half of the poem reveals the consequences of nature's fall from gold. After a brief hour of golden promise, the poem declares, "Then leaf subsides to leaf." As always, Frost's exact phrasing is significant. Notice his unusual repetition of the word leaf within the same short line. Taken literally, the line suggests that the leaf was always intended to be only a green leaf, not a golden flower. If the flower lasted only an hour, the leaf, the poem suggests, survives for longer. Viewed as a description of the natural world, this observation appears eminently reasonable. A branch might blossom for only a week but the resulting leaves last for months. Frost's poem, however, is now about to move beyond seasonal observations of Nature.

Suddenly the poem takes a surprising turn. After seemingly presenting only the natural world in the first five lines, "Nothing Gold Can Stay" now offers a mythic or theological simile to describe the leaf's change from gold to green. "So Eden sank to grief," the poem unexpectedly declares. Until now a reader might assume that the shift from gold to green was only descriptive and not evaluative, but the use of grief indicates that the transition is in some sense unfortunate and perhaps even painful. The poem then shifts focus again from the mythic to the temporal. "So dawn goes dawn to day" brings the stated subject back to the natural world, but this time the words point to the daily cycle of night and day rather than the annual cycle of the seasons.

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" explicitly describes identical moments in three temporal cycles: the daily, the yearly, and the mythic. In each case the poem depicts the moment when the promise of perfection declines into something lesser. Gold unabashedly becomes a symbol–a very traditional one–for the highest value and most radiant beauty. Spring, dawn, and Eden are each a sort of Golden Age, an impermanent paradise. What lies ahead is never stated overtly, but it is inarguably present by implication. Day is inevitably followed by night. Summer is succeeded by fall and winter. The green leaf eventually turns brown and decays. The loss of Eden gave Adam and Eve mortality. Human youth, by implication, is followed by maturity, old age, and ultimately death. The golden moment, therefore, is all the more precious because it is transitory. By focusing on a single moment, Frost evokes an entire day, year, lifetime, and human history.

If "Nothing Gold Can Stay" can be satisfactorily interpreted on a natural, mythic, and theological levels, it can also be read –in general terms at least–from a biographical perspective. Written by a middle-aged man who had already lost two children, both parents, and his closest friend (the British author Edward Thomas who is commemorated in the poem placed immediately before "Nothing Gold Can Stay" in New Hampshire), this short work evokes a point in life when the golden illusions of youth have vanished. The poem is not explicitly autobiographical. Frost's poem virtually never are. It reaches for broader resonance than the merely personal. Yet anyone familiar with Frost's often difficult life can see that its hard-won wisdom was rooted in bitter experience. How characteristic of Frost that the personal origins of the poem–whatever they were–have been so magnificently transcended into a universal vision of the human condition. What the reader encounters is not a private complaint about life's injustice but a tender if heartbreaking expression of the transience of beauty and the grief of mortality."    
                                                                                                                                 -Dana Gioia