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.
"Nothing Gold Can Stay" was written in 1923 by the American poet Robert Frost. It was published in a collection called New Hampshire the same year, which would later win the 1924 Pulitzer Prize. Frost is well-known for using depictions of rural life to explore wider social and philosophical themes. "Nothing Gold Can Stay," written when Frost was 48, is no exception, using the metaphor of spring's ending to examine the transience of youth, beauty, and ultimately life itself.
Summary
In early spring, the fresh buds on the trees are gold. This color is the quickest to disappear from the natural world, however. The fresh blossoms on the trees are flowers, but these flowers disappear quickly too. They turn into leaves that fall to the ground, just as humankind fell from the paradise of the Garden of Eden, and just as the promising early light of morning gives way to daytime. Nothing beautiful, fresh, or pure can last forever.
Themes
The Transience of Life, Beauty, and Youth
“Nothing Gold Can Stay” is about the fleeting nature of beauty, youth, and life itself. According to the poem, nothing “gold”—essentially nothing pure, precious, or beautiful—can last forever.
The poem begins by focusing on changes in the natural world. The “first green” leaves of spring are compared to gold, nature’s most prized metal, immediately establishing gold as symbolic of everything that is fresh, youthful, and beautiful. Yet this “hue” is also the “hardest” for nature, personified in the poem as a female figure, “to hold.” Nature is trying to stop the freshness of early spring from fading, perhaps like a mother who wishes her children would stay young forever.
This is impossible, and readers know that the first buds of spring will mature and, eventually, fall. The speaker then speeds the natural cycle up to hammer home this point, saying that the first blossom of spring lasts “only … an hour.” This is an exaggeration of course, but it emphasizes just how fleeting this fresh, lovely stage of life is. The precious beauty and innocence of youth, the poem is saying, flashes by in the blink of an eye.
The speaker then broadens the poem’s scope to include Eden, the biblical paradise from which human beings were expelled according to the Book of Genesis. Eden was a land free from sin and suffering that infamously and inevitably ended, the speaker says, just as the promise of the new morning (“dawn”) must give way to the reality of the day. In each of these examples, something beautiful and innocent—untainted by the world—proves fleeting, unable to endure.
In the second half of the poem the speaker also notably starts using language related to sinking or descending to describe the path of everything that is at one time young and beautiful. This suggests that the inability of anything “gold” to last is because life itself is a corrupting force that drags such beauty down. Thus, Eden didn’t simply end; it “sank to grief.” This implies that it began on a high—but, like leaves and flowers that flutter to the ground from tree tops, couldn’t stay in such a vaulted place, protected from earthly realities. Similarly, "dawn goes down to day."
The idea of dawn going “down to day” is especially unusual, and inverts the familiar image of the sun rising into daylight. Metaphorically, dawn can be interpreted as the beginning of a life—a blank slate for a new day. Its going “down to day” thus highlights the loss or tainting of that opportunity, as well as the process of aging and, ultimately, death. Indeed, the poem looking downward subtly evokes burial and the notion that all life inevitably ends up in the ground.
Overall, then, the poem argues that nothing pure or perfect can last; life takes its toll on everything, and death awaits us all. The promise of spring is followed by autumn and winter; green leaves will turn brown and begin to rot. Yet the poem may not necessarily be trying to create melancholy. Instead, perhaps it’s pushing the reader to accept the reality of such transience in order to better appreciate golden moments while they last.
금빛은 오래 머물지 않는다
자연의 첫 초록은 금빛
잡아두기 제일 어려운 빛깔.
자연의 이른 잎은 꽃.
허나 짧은 시간밖에 가지 못하고
잎은 잎으로 가라앉고 만다.
그처럼 에덴은 슬픔에 빠져들었고
그처럼 새벽은 낮으로 내려앉는다.
금빛인 것은 오래가지 못한다.
이 영시는 짧지만 심오한 의미를 담은 작품으로 불과 여덟 개의 행으로 황금처럼 찬란한 것은 영원할 수 없다는 메인 테마를 평범한 단어로 묘사해 준다.
심플한 패턴의 라임 패턴인 AA, BB, CC, DD 형식을 띠고, 자연의 이미지와 프로스트의 훌륭한 은유법 심벌리즘, 라임, 운율로 함축된 멋진 작품이다.
1행에서 4행까지
시인 로버트 프로스트는 초 봄의 자연/'first green'이 어떻게 지난해의 황금빛에서 다른 색으로 변하는지 그리고 이파리에서 꽃으로 피었지만 이도 잠시뿐이며, 인생과 젊음, 그리고 자연의 아름다움의 무상함을 표현한다.
5행에서 8행은 변화를 제시한다.
이 변화는 한 생명이 죽으면서, 또 다른 생명을 낳아서 풍성한 생명체들이 존재할 수 있는 것을 시사한다.
하지만 이렇게 되기까지 피할 수 없는 죽음은 슬픔과 고통을 유발하지만(the grief of Eden) 결국 이 고통에서 새 생명과 행복을 가져다준다고 시인은 말한다.
그래서 자연의 순환은 색깔의 변화로 지속되며, 아울러 자연 속은 모든 것은 변하며(노화) 소멸되기에 자연의 아름다움과 우리 주위의 사람들의 중요성을 깨닫고 고마워해야 한다는 것도 암시한다.