Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 18 views

    Nothing Gold Can Stay

    Uploaded by

    Naureen Yaqub
    Robert Frost is regarded as one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century. He preferred more traditional poetic forms rather than modernist styles. Many of his poems feature nature, woods, and trees. Some of his most famous poems are short and concise, like "Fire and Ice" and "But Outer Space". "Nothing Gold Can Stay" is one of Frost's shortest poems. In just eight lines, it offers a view of the world where nothing lasts forever, from nature's changing colors to Eden's fall from grace. The poem explores how nature's beauty is fleeting, like Eden's paradise was lost. Frost's choice of "can" rather than "will" in the title

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Nothing Gold Can Stay

    Uploaded by

    Naureen Yaqub
    18 views2 pages
    Robert Frost is regarded as one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century. He preferred more traditional poetic forms rather than modernist styles. Many of his poems feature nature, woods, and trees. Some of his most famous poems are short and concise, like "Fire and Ice" and "But Outer Space". "Nothing Gold Can Stay" is one of Frost's shortest poems. In just eight lines, it offers a view of the world where nothing lasts forever, from nature's changing colors to Eden's fall from grace. The poem explores how nature's beauty is fleeting, like Eden's paradise was lost. Frost's choice of "can" rather than "will" in the title

    Original Title

    NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    Robert Frost is regarded as one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century. He preferred more traditional poetic forms rather than modernist styles. Many of his poems feature nature, woods, and trees. Some of his most famous poems are short and concise, like "Fire and Ice" and "But Outer Space". "Nothing Gold Can Stay" is one of Frost's shortest poems. In just eight lines, it offers a view of the world where nothing lasts forever, from nature's changing colors to Eden's fall from grace. The poem explores how nature's beauty is fleeting, like Eden's paradise was lost. Frost's choice of "can" rather than "will" in the title

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    18 views2 pages

    Nothing Gold Can Stay

    Uploaded by

    Naureen Yaqub
    Robert Frost is regarded as one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century. He preferred more traditional poetic forms rather than modernist styles. Many of his poems feature nature, woods, and trees. Some of his most famous poems are short and concise, like "Fire and Ice" and "But Outer Space". "Nothing Gold Can Stay" is one of Frost's shortest poems. In just eight lines, it offers a view of the world where nothing lasts forever, from nature's changing colors to Eden's fall from grace. The poem explores how nature's beauty is fleeting, like Eden's paradise was lost. Frost's choice of "can" rather than "will" in the title

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 2

    About Robert Frost

    Robert Frost (1874-1963) is regarded as one of the greatest American poets of the
    twentieth century. And yet he didn’t belong to any particular movement: unlike his
    contemporaries William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens he was not a modernist,
    preferring more traditional modes and utilising a more direct and less obscure poetic
    language. He famously observed of free verse, which was favoured by many modernist
    poets, that it was ‘like playing tennis with the net down’.

    Many of his poems are about the natural world, with woods and trees featuring
    prominently in some of his most famous and widely anthologised poems (‘The Road Not
    Taken’, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘Birches’, ‘Tree at My Window’).
    Elsewhere, he was fond of very short and pithy poetic statements: see ‘Fire and Ice’ and
    ‘But Outer Space’, for example.

    LITERATURE: A Short Analysis of Robert Frost’s ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’

    By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

    ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ is one of Robert Frost’s shortest poems, and, along with ‘Fire and
    Ice’, probably his best-known and most widely studied very short poem. The poem was
    published in 1923, first of all in the Yale Review  and then, later the same year, in Frost’s
    poetry collection New Hampshire. You can read ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ before proceeding
    to our analysis below.

    This ad Nothing Gold Can Stay


    BY  RO BE RT FR OS T
    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.
     
    will end in 4
     
    First, a brief summary of the poem. In just eight lines, Robert Frost (1874-1963) offers a
    fairly comprehensive view of the world, taking in the mutability of everything in it from the
    leaves on the trees to the purest good that existed in Eden before the Fall. ‘Nothing lasts
    forever’ might be a pale (or white gold?) paraphrase of Frost’s golden meaning.

    We begin with what reads like almost a paradox: ‘Nature’s first green is gold’. Since nature
    turns leaves both green and gold, there’s some initial uncertainty and ambiguity: is the
    poet saying that nature’s green leaves in the spring are rare and precious like gold? This
    seems likely.

    The succession of aspirants in the second line, with the quadruple alliteration on ‘Her
    hardest hue to hold’, seems sighingly to concede that the greenness of spring is thought
    rare and precious to us (like gold) because we know it is short-lived and temporary:
    nature’s green will give way to gold in the autumn. ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’, then, is an
    autumn poem.

    The third and fourth lines elaborate on this: nature flowers beautifully in spring, but only
    for ‘an hour’ or so. The phrase ‘leaf subsides to leaf’ seems confusing. How can a leaf
    subside to  a leaf? Well, because a green leaf turns into a golden or brown leaf as autumn
    comes on, nature changing its colours with the changing of the seasons. Then those leaves
    will die altogether, falling from the trees and flowers onto the ground.

    But in the next line’s reference to the Garden of Eden, Frost broadens the focus of this
    short poem to take in questions of religion as well as nature: if the death of leaves each
    autumn is a loss of paradise, then it is like that original paradise which we lost, according
    to Christian tradition: the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Of course,
    these two ideas, religion and nature, are linked through Eden being a garden, full of
    flowers (and leaves).

    It’s possible here that Frost is summoning (without explicitly mentioning) the word ‘fall’,
    which helps to provide further significance to the Eden reference: the leaves fall in the
    autumn (a season known as ‘Fall’ in North America, of course, where Frost lived for much
    of his life, aside for a few years in England), and it was the Fall of Adam and Eve that led to
    their expulsion from Eden.

    Having momentarily taken in the Biblical in this line, the focus of the penultimate line of
    ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ returns to the small: dawn ‘goes down’ to day, just as a green leaf
    subsides to a gold or brown one. The final line, ‘Nothing gold can stay’, brings us back to
    the poem’s title, whose enigmatic meaning is now clearer: nothing beautiful, rare, or
    precious lasts for long.

    But Frost’s choice of the auxiliary verb ‘can’ (rather than ‘will’, although many readers may
    misremember the title of the poem as ‘Nothing Gold Will Stay’) suggests that this is the
    way it’s meant to be: nature is not meant to be static.

    SOURCE: https://interestingliterature.com/2020/05/robert-frost-nothing-gold-can-stay-
    analysis/

    You might also like