Poem 407. 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 laments the fact that beauty is evanescent: leaves and flowers fade from their glorious hues and the promise of the dawn sinks into the mundanity of daylight. As Frost says, the gilding lying on the first flowers soon fades. He likens this to Man’s ejection from the Garden of Eden and the grief felt by Man since then.

He begins with the idea that the first shoots of newly grown plants have a golden lustre to them and remarks that this lustre is difficult if not impossible to retain. Likewise, flowers are fleeting and their beauty soon passes, leaving only the green leaves to mark the glory of their existence, just as the splendour and purity of the Garden of Eden are now only legends recounted with sadness. In the same way, the gilded skies that accompany a beautiful sunrise fade and are lost as the sun fully rises and so Frost concludes that like the flowers and the sunrise, “Nothing gold can stay”.

I like the way he uses alliteration to emphasise his point: “Her hardest hue to hold” and “dawn goes down to day”. Frost’s popularity in America assures that there are performances of the poem on YouTube and there’s quite a good one by Shane Morris on the RedFrost Motivation channel.

Evanescence Nothing Gold Can Stay Robert Frost