Robert Frost

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nothing Gold Can Stay - meaning Summary

Ephemeral Beauty and Loss

Frost’s short poem states that the earliest, most luminous stage of life and nature is brief and inevitably fades. Using a simple progression—first green to leaf, dawn to day—the speaker links natural change to human states such as youth, innocence, and loss. The Eden reference compresses a theological fall into the same pattern, suggesting that beginnings of purity are transient. The tone is elegiac but resigned: loss is natural, recurrent, and universal. The poem compresses a broad philosophical claim about impermanence into a tight, memorable image.

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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.

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