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, 1923
It is hard to decide what is my favorite Robert Frost poem. I particularly love this one. Although it immediately brings autumn in New Hampshire to mind, that last line has much more meaning. Nothing gold can stay...
1 comment:
My favorite Frost poem is "After Apple Picking." I love it. It first hit home with me when I was a teenager and decided to sell off my herd of Guernsey dairy cows and give up the daily agricultural grind to pursue other interests.
I didn't see the poem so much as a metaphor for physical death, but as an ending to one era of my life and moving on to different things. Particularly the last few lines, "The woodchuck could say whether it's like his/Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,/Or just some human sleep." They make me think that maybe I'm just putting this part of my life aside for now and I may come back to it in the future.
Post a Comment