Analysis of "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost

 

In my initial reading of this poem, the volta struck me hard.  The tonal structure in the poem reminds me of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience in the way how the allusions to religion hit hard -- looking at religious symbols in another, but ethical light through strong images.

The poem starts out like something from the songs of innocence, "Nature's first green is gold / Her hardest hue to hold."  With each end-stopped line every line feels important.  I feel there's a sense of reverence with these lines as though to show how hard "Nature" works.

"Her early leaf's a flower; / But only so an hour." I think the key word in these lines is "early." The beginning. The Songs of Innocence. The joy of creation. Something beautiful created.  The rhyme scheme is so pronounced it harkens back to hymns.  However, with a semi-colon the poem adds a temporal component -- how long can this flower last.  The Songs of Experience.

"Then leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief,"

I looked up the definition of "subsides" in Bard and it gave me a definition.  Then I wrote, "what does leaf subsides to leaf mean?"  And below is the response:

In the poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost, the line "Then leaf subsides to leaf" means that one leaf changes into another leaf. The first leaf is a metaphor for a flower, which is beautiful and fleeting. The second leaf is a more mature leaf, which is still beautiful but not as fleeting. The poem is about the cycle of life and how things change and die.

The word "subsides" can also be interpreted to mean that the first leaf becomes less important or less beautiful as it becomes more mature. This could be seen as a metaphor for the way that we often value things that are new and fresh, and how we may take things for granted as they become older.

 I agree with this analysis.  Well some of it.  I'm not sure the leaf is portrayed as "beautiful."  Rather I thought about how, sometimes, plants live but never bloom again like every orchid I tried to take care of, and it's just leaves.  Then you're stuck there wondering if you should throw out the orchid or wait if it will bloom again if it ever does.  

So when the comparison to Eden comes in then, for me, there's a religious hit.  Will there ever be Eden again?  In any lifetime including the after kind.  Also the anthropomorphism of Eden feeling focuses the image but also expands it religiously.

"So dawn goes down to day. / Nothing gold can stay."  The alliteration of "d" with "dawn goes down to day" feels like a natural progression dawn does change to day, but the part of "goes down" adds to the idea of grief -- life moves on and away.  "Nothing gold can stay."