Nothing Gold Can Stay (poem)

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Nothing Gold Can Stay
by Robert Frost
NothingFrost23.jpg
Written1923
First published in The Yale Review
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Subject(s)Transience, impermanence, beauty, nature, change
Form Lyric poem
Meter iambic trimeter
Rhyme scheme AABBCCDD
Publication dateOctober 1923
Lines8
Full text
Wikisource-logo.svg Nothing Gold Can Stay at Wikisource
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.

Contents

Reading of "Nothing Gold Can Stay"

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" is a short poem written by Robert Frost in 1923 and published in The Yale Review in October of that year.

It was later published in the collection New Hampshire (1923), [1] which earned Frost the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The poem lapsed into public domain in 2019. [2] New Hampshire also included Frost's poems "Fire and Ice" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening".

Analysis

The poem is written in the form of a lyric poem, [3] with an iambic trimeter meter and AABBCCDD rhyme scheme. [4]

Reception

Alfred R. Ferguson wrote of the poem, "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." [5]

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. [5]

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." [5]

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." [5]

Musical adaptations

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