Breeding lilacs from the dead earth
2006 April 6
Nothing Gold Can Stay
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.
this poem will
forever
remind me of grade seven
and reading
the outsiders
by se hinton…
thank you for that memory
stunts… i don’t get it.
I’ll be back after i think about it more. i’ll let you know if it makes sense to me after some thought.
When spring comes to the world, the first shoots, the first leaves that the wakening plants put out are not so much green — but golden. We talk about them being green but their first oh-so-fleeting appearance is gold. Before leaves become leaves, they are flowers — tiny leaf buds. But so quickly that tiny moment when the world is golden and new and flowered becomes ordinary — leaves become leaves. Dawn becomes daytime. The fleeting perfection (Eden) dissipates and we are left, not with something horrible at all, but something just slightly less miraculous. Babies become squalling toddlers. Children grow cynical. First loves fight. The world turns.
The poem has always caught at my heart because it is not exactly sad — but not exactly cheerful. We should not seek to hold on to the gold because the right course is for it to bloom onward into fullness, even if in so doing, we lose something sweet. It is perhaps more sweet because it passes so quickly.
When Ed and I first met, we argued over this poem and evolved the saying: Stay gold. Grow green. I feel — I want to believe, that we can hold the golden moments in our hearts — but we must not attempt to hold onto moments which are gone, to youth which is fled, to loves that are past. We must, as players in this world, grow onwards and upwards. Grow green. Spread our branches without weeping for the gold we have lost.
It is for me, almost unbearably bittersweet.
You didn’t have to do that for me- thanks. You see, had I tried to decipher it on my own, I am guesing I woulnd’t have come up with that. I swear I have a block in my brain where poetry is concerned, but I am getting much better, slowly but surely.
Thanks for breaking it down like that.
I can appreciate it now.
I knew I liked you. I think about this poem all the time. Love your break down of the poem. I just noticed that you put you’d like to be Dorothy Parker. That’s exactly who you make me think of.