Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

 

"Nothing Gold Can Stay"

(1923)

 

Robert Frost

(March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963)



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.
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Notes

This poem was first published in the Yale Review in October 1923 and later included in Frost's collection of poetry New Hampshire that same year.


felix culpa: Latin, felix "happy" + culpa "fault, blame"


carpe diem:


1  gold: 

 

6  Eden: allusion to the Garden of Eden and man's first sin

 

 



"Nothing Gold Can Stay" (1923)
"Nothing Golden Stays" (1920)
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.


















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 Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaves are flowers—
But only so for hours;
Then leaves subside to leaves.
In autumn she achieves
A still more golden blaze
But nothing golden stays.

Of white, blue, gold and green,
The only colors seen
And thought of in the vast,
The gold is soonest past.
A moment it appears
At either end of years,
At either end of days.
But nothing golden stays.

In gold as it began
The world will end for man.
And some belief avow
The world is ending now.
The final age of gold
In what we now behold.
If so, we’d better gaze,
For nothing golden stays.

 




"Nothing Gold Can Stay" first appeared in the Yale Review (Oct. 1923) and was collected in New Hampshire that same year. Though placed in a section titled "Grace Notes," "Nothing Gold" is no mere ornament but a lyric of surprising reach and power, displaying in its eight short lines, Frost's genius for revealing the largest of issues in the smallest of events.
[...]
       "Nothing Gold" expresses this resistance [to/of time] not only in its mention of "grief" and its pervasive elegiac tone but in the drama enacted by the rhythm and sound of each line. The poem's trimeter line is ucommonly short in English verse, and against such brevity, Frost has amassed long vowels and a density of consonants that actually lengthen the time of utterance. For example, in the first line, the massing of "r," "s," and "t" sounds (especially with the double-stress in "first green") combines with the long vowels in "green" and "gold" to slow a line that, like the experience it describes, will end all too soon. In the second line, the alliterative "h's" retard the expelled breath to slow the advancing line and reproduce in the throat the holding effort of heart and mind. Even as a change speeds for in the poem's second half, the series of long vowels in each line not only voices a lament for what passes but holds the note as long as it can.

--Nancy Lewis Tuten, and John Zubizarreta, The Robert Frost Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001): 240.


Felix Culpa: Frost and Eden

[...]

       Nowhere is the "image of the nature and destiny of man" captured more resonantly than in the account of Adam and Eve and their loss of Eden, no story more central to the "human condition"—to the relationships between love and death, both of these to acts of creation, and creation to destruction—than is this one. Perhaps it is because it encompasses all of these relationships that Frost found it a congenial metaphor and alluded so often to Eden or the Fall. Obsessed as he was by fear of death, equally obsessed as he was by fears of his own poetic barrenness, and related as the two are to each other and to the need for love, the vision of Eden and the loss of Eden provide for Frost and his readers a metaphoric meeting ground of mutual understanding—a shorthand where little needs to be made explicit once the echo or allusion provides the signal.

       The introduction of Eden into the poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay" is such a signal. The changing of seasons and the force of gravity that forces everything in the poem downward would invite our reading the poem to include more than simply the nature of nature; yet the mythic echo makes a larger significance absolutely unmistakable and forces us to see "gold" in the context of "golden age" as well as season.

[...]

       Nothing gold can stay, but then what else stays? Leaves will fall as seasons end; days end; and that "Eden sank to grief" reminds us that among other "griefs" caused by a loss of Eden [end of page 224] is the major grief of death and loss which no one can escape. This major inescapable fact of life is told to us in the most matter-of-fact way. The fact that the poem was condensed from three stanzas to one is significant, for there are realities that are pointless to embellish. That autumn will be gold again we need not be told, for what is important is that that gold will not stay. That sunsets and sunrises are gold we can supply from our own experience and that these do not stay any more than the leaves—we know this too. The brevity of the poem and of each line, the regularity of its rhythm and its rhyming couplets, the repetitions and the simplicity of its declarative sentences, the fact that the last four lines are one clause per line, emphasizing the increasing weight, the gravitational downward pull of everything in the poem, all of this contributes to a tone that says flatly and simply: This is it. That's life. Every statement and image in the poem is allowed to speak for itself, and what more do we need? There is no sentimentalization, no dramatization. Anything more than the truth would have been too weak.

       In earlier versions there are references to the gold of autumn, yet in neither are there references to Eden. In the obviously earlier of the two we find the line "For nothing gold can stay" followed by a playing with the idea of "an end de luxe" and thus:


In autumn she achieves
Another golden flame
And yet it's not the same
It [sic] not as lovely quite
As that first golden light.


The obviously later, typed, three-stanza version, entitled "Nothing Golden Stays," reads as follows:


Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaves are flowers;

But only so for hours. [end page 225]

 

Then leaves subside to leaves.

In autumn she achieves

A still more golden blaze.

But nothing golden stays.


This version goes on to draw the analogy to days and ends by saying in the last stanza:


In gold as it began

The world will end for man.

And some belief avow

The world is ending now:

The final age of gold

In what we now behold.

If so, we'd better gaze,

For nothing golden stays.


We have spelled out for us the various associations with gold: color in early spring, color in fall, material wealth, and even a hint at an apocalyptic conflagration of gold, an idea written into the much later poem "It Is Almost the Year Two Thousand," wherein Frost inserted several of the lines rejected from these earlier versions.

       In the version as we have it, Frost has introduced the analogy between changing leaves and passing time ("So dawn goes down to day") and the reference to Eden, which makes us conscious of several kinds of "falling." What Frost has achieved in such concentration is more than simply starkness, matter-of-factness of tone, and superb understatement; there is a compression in the writing which parallels the compression of life and death, spring and fall, dawn and day, and forces us to recognize that fall is implicit in spring; that sunset is implicit in dawn; and that transitoriness is the nature of life since "Eden sank to grief" at the dawn of man's existence.



--Judith Oster, Toward Robert Frost: The Reader and the Poet (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991)




The Figure a Poem Makes


Granted no one but a humanist much cares how sound a poem is if it is only a sound. The sound is the gold in the ore. Then we will have the sound out alone and dispense with the inessential. We do till we make the discovery that the object in writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other, and the resources for that of vowels, consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sentences, metre are not enough. We need the help of context- meaning-subject matter. That is the greatest help towards variety. All that can be done with words is soon told. So also with metres-particularly in our language where there are virtually but two, strict iambic and loose iambic. The ancients with many were still poor if they depended on metres for all tune. It is painful to watch our sprung-rhythmists straining at the point of omitting one short from a foot for relief from monotony. The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited metre are endless. And we are back in poetry as merely one more art of having something to say, sound or unsound. Probably better if sound, because deeper and from wider experience.

Then there is this wildness whereof it is spoken. Granted again that it has an equal claim with sound to being a poem's better half. If it is a wild tune, it is a Poem. [...]


It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life-not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood-and indeed from the very mood. [...]

[...]

A schoolboy may be defined as one who can tell you what he knows in the order in which he learned it. The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic. More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts. [...] For myself the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described: from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.


--Robert Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes," The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Mark Richardson (Cambridge: Belknap, 2007): 131–33.



 

 

Study Questions

  • What is the significance of the order or progression of the things described in the poem?
  • Why is the word "down" appropriate?

            

 

 


 

 

 

 


Sample Student Responses to Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay" 


   

Response 1:

Study Question:

 

 

 

 

 

Student Name

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

June 12, 2010

Reading Response 1

  

Title

 

Text.

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

Reference


Frost, Robert. "Nothing Gold Can Stay." Complete Poems of Robert Frost. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967. 272. Print.





 

 

Links

 


Media
  • The Outsiders, dir. Francis Ford Coppola (1983; excerpt of Ponyboy reciting the poem)


  • Robert Frost: Versed in Country Things, PBS (documentary excerpt)



Robert Frost

 

 

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Last updated October 21, 2015