Glamour and style for a Guardian on the move.
Definition/Summary:
Poetry
Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay”
- Combines Frost’s attraction to details of nature with his tendency to make direct statements of theme
- Meant to addresses the fleeting nature of beauty and innocence
- Written when Frost was 48 years old, an experienced poet, whose life had known grief and family tragedy, the poem focuses on the inevitability of loss – how nature, time and mythology are all subject to cycles.
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost, 1874 – 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.
Expanded info:
Book SE Hinton and later film “The Outsiders”
- As he lies dying in Chapter 9, Johnny Cade speaks these words to Ponyboy. “Stay gold”
- This is a reference to the Robert Frost poem that Ponyboy recites to Johnny when the two hide out in the Windrixville Church
- One line in the poem reads, “Nothing gold can stay,” meaning that all good things must come to an end
- At the end of the book, Johnny urges Ponyboy to remain gold, or innocent due to what he has learned by years of futile fighting
- “Stay Golden Ponyboy”
Add/Misc:
The characters regularly took part in fights called “Rumbles”