Nothing Gold Can Stay
By Robert Frost
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.
When I first heard this poem recited in The Outsiders, I was eleven and fully understood the meaning of the poem. I was there watching the sunrise with Ponyboy and Johnny and understood that things were going to change.
My grandmother used to say, “Nothing lasts always. Not the good or the bad.” Nothing stays the same. Innocence, beauty, life, and the direction of the wind will change. Ready or not, things change and we will change too. So how do we lean into the swell and ride the wave?
We breathe.
We pay attention.
We take what we can from the present.
I’ve been thinking about how I can live more fully in the present tense. So just as I feel memoir helps us keep our past selves alive, poetry arrives with the urgency of now. It asks, “What can you do if only so an hour?”
Poetry asks you to keep time and hold language and image together in the present.
More questions for your present self:
How are you keeping time, and how are you allowing it to keep you in rhythm, meter, or in the bitter or sweat of life you still have?
What golden memories can you mine to satisfy your grief?
How can we magnify the beauty in one leaf?
How do you treasure what you want to stay?
How can you make the most of the dawn before it goes to day?
Nothing Gold Can Stay