Friday, June 18, 2010

Nothing Gold Can Stay

My favourite Robert Frost poem is 'Nothing Gold Can Stay'.
I'm reading a collection of his poetry in preparation for next year as I'm taking English Lit (if my GCSE results are good enough). As I was reading this book, 'The poetry of Robert Frost', I picked this one as a knock-out. I then googled it and according to Wikipedia it's one of his "most famous poems". I guess I have amazing taste.

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.

1 comment:

chumbles said...

If you want to learn about poetic imagery - go to Shakespeare and William Blake; the latter's hard, but so, so deeply complex when you get in amongst it that you can lose any sense of yourself. Thank you for this; nice to have a different feel to today! I'm hoping that this (badly scanning) poem in reply will be a form of recompense.

As Eden sank to grief
So Eve bedecked herself;
In the colours of the land
And the rings upon her hand
That made the rainbow of the sky -
So we will remember why.

Gold is not forgotten
In the passage of her scent
And the arc of heaven's day;
Gold is not forgotten
Nor the reasons, it was spent.
She reminds us that we lay
In the beauty of these shades
Born out of nature's sorrow -
She stole the cloth of heaven
To light our way tomorrow.