Richard D.

Cureton
Department of English Language and Literature
University of Michigan

A Reading in Temporal Poetics: Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay"

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.

--Robert Frost

The speaker in "Nothing Gold Can Stay" gives us the ancient view of history as a

steady decline from an initial "golden age" to a series of lesser cultural eras (silver,

bronze, and iron/lead). As the poem takes advantage of with its images of flower and leaf,

dawn and day, this view of history is a physical/natural one, a reflection of the general

orientation of the ancient world toward the body and cyclical time. In the physical/natural

world, there is indeed a general decline. Spring and summer are bright, warm, and

burgeoning; then autumn brings a withering, and winter, death. Our own physical lives

decline in this way, too. In youth, we are stronger, quicker, and more attractive. Many of

our "golden" qualities emerge early; then they are slowly lost, until we are left with

something less, then something lesser yet, then little at all. A particularly poignant

instance of this view of history is the Christian myth of the garden of Eden. According to
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this myth, with Eve's disobedience and the eating of the apple of the knowledge of good

and evil, we "fell" from grace into a life of labor and death. Many of Frost's best poems

are about our mythic "fall" out a "golden" childhood into a diminished adulthood and the

irretrievable sense of personal loss this "fall" entails.

This cyclical view of history is only one point of view, however, and one that is

only true of certain things (e.g., physical decline, the loss of the "child" within us, a "fall"

from grace, etc.). As we age, we lose our physical vitality and innocence, but some things

continue to grow, not reaching their fullest realization until the end. As we age, we grow

deeper in love, stronger in character, and wiser in counsel. Memory, our strongest mental

capacity, is particularly resistant to a falling off with time. Like an ocean or the sky, our

memories are boundless and therefore, over time, just expand. As a result, in relative

time, the time of memory, history is not a steady falling off but just the reverse, a

continual rise. History and the passage of time can be seen as taking other, equally

legitimate and revealing, patterns, too--rise and fall, fall and rise, etc.

Frost is a modern poet, writing in an era whose dominant temporality is relative

time. His embracing of this cyclical view of history, then, is ironic, and this irony is

reflected in many ways in the poem. "Nothing Gold Can Stay" does not just say that

history is a fall. It laments that falling off. For Frost, as for the ancients, decline is

inevitable, but for those who enjoy and value freedom, as Frost's culture did, such an

inevitable loss is especially poignant. Given his cultural and historical positioning, for

Frost, history should have a rising arc, but doesn't; we should mellow as we age, but

don't. Before the day even begins, Frost suggests, our possibilities have suffered a

decline, just as the bright colors of dawn inevitably fade into the white light of day.
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Before we even have a chance to "branch out" and show our mature "leaves," we are

"deflowered."

This irony is expressed in various ways in the form of the poem. First, the poem is

not just cyclical in its texture; it interweaves all of the temporalities and puts them into

dynamic interaction. This formal diversity is relativistic/ironic in itself; each formal

texture undermines and critiques the others. For instance, the poem is not just past tense

("sank"), the cyclical tense, but present tense ("is," "subsides," "goes") and relative tense

("to hold") as well. Second, this poem about decline does not just describe and lament our

historical decline; as we will see in a moment, it enacts that decline. The poem begins in

cyclical and lyric time and then itself "falls" into linear time. This enactment reveals, not

just the facts of decline, but the acute sense of loss that accompanies it. Finally, some of

the formal detail in the poem is specifically and pointedly relativistic. For instance, in

addition to spots of dissonant sound ("dawn"-"down"; "her"-"hardest"-"hold"), the poem

is strongly prepositional and adverbial: "only," (for) "an hour," "to leaf," "to grief," "to

day." Prepositions and adverbials are peripheral items that often serve relativistic

functions--polyvocalism, multidimensionality, simultaneity, etc. For instance, when the

speaker notes that the flowers remain "only" an hour, it is clear that this is not just a

statement about brevity but a lamenting of it and a realization that other, and better,

possibilities have been denied. The joltingly placed "Nothing" that concludes the poem

is also a reflex of relative time.

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" tells the story of the "fall" in an odd blend of logical

and temporal forms, part linear, part cyclical and centered, with the two formal textures

dueling for control of the poem at the midpoint.

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Like the sensibilities in a "golden age" or in Eden before the fall., "Nothing Gold

Can Stay" begins with a joyful blend of body and soul, sensation and emotion,

harmoniously wedded in song, Semantically, cyclical archetypes of the physical

("Nature," "first," "gold," "early," "dawn," "down," "subside") mix with centered

archetypes of emotion ("Eden," "green," "flower," "stay," "hold"). Sonically, alliteration

("green"-"gold"-"goes"-"gold"-"grief"; "dawn"-"down"-"day"; "hardest"-"hue"-"hold";

"Nature's"-"nothing"; "subside"-"so"-"so"-"so"), echoing and strengthening (syllabic)

onsets like cyclical time, combines with assonance ("only"-'so"-"so"-"so"-"goes"-"gold";

"Eden"-"leaf"), echoing and strengthening (syllabic) centers like lyric time. Syntactically

and rhetorically, adjectives ("green," "gold," "gold") and synecdoche ("green," "gold,"

"leaf," etc.), which foreground parts of wholes like lyric/centered time, combine with the

third person ("Nature," "Eden," "dawn," etc.) and generic nouns ("leaf," "grief," "dawn,"

"day," "a flower," etc.), which are more impersonal and holistic like cyclical time.

Copular clauses ("Nature's first green is gold," "Her early leaf's a flower") and

possessive/genitive noun phrases ("Nature's," "her," "her"), reflexes of lyric/centroidal

time mix with repetition ("leaf"-"leaf"-"so"-"so"-"so"), intransitive verbs ("go," "stay,"

"sink," "subside") and apposition (e.g., "gold / Her hardest hue to hold"), reflexes of

cyclical time. And so forth. Sometimes the cyclical and the lyric are not just combined in

context but concentrated in one form or pattern of forms. For instance, the poem is

rhymed in couplets ("gold"-"hold"; "flower"-"hour"; "leaf-"grief"; "day"-"stay"), a union

of the binary forms and symmetry characteristic of cyclical time with the centering

characteristic of lyric time. Some of the assonance in the poem is also strengthened to
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reverse rhyme ("grief"-"green, "goes"-"gold"), a blend of the echoing onsets

characteristic of cyclical time with the echoing centers characteristic of lyric time.

In song, rhythm and voice are the most prominent forms, so it is these forms that

express this psychology of the "golden age"/Eden most strongly in this first stanza. The

meter of "Nothing Gold Can Stay" is very strong, regular, and independent of the

language that elicits it. At the lowest level, the level of the pulse, this meter is triple and

runs strongly against the regularly duple patterning of syllables and stresses. At the line

level, this meter has four tactical beats, with the fourth beat occurring in silence at the end

of each line. And at the levels of the stanza and section, this meter runs strongly against

the couplet patterning of lines, grouping couplets into quatrains and then the quatrains

into the text as a whole. This rhythmic interplay of triple pulsing with duple voicing,

four-beat lines with three-stress phrasing, and couplet rhymes with quatrain stanzas is

another instance of the close interplay between emblems of body and soul, emotion and

sensation, in this first stanza. Meter is an emblem of sensation and the body; phrasing is

an emblem of emotion and the soul.

Line 1

___________________________
/ \ tone unit
w-a s-xr
___________________ _______
/ \/ \ phonological phrase
w s w
______ ______ ___ _______
/ \/ \/ \/ \ clitic phrase
sw w s
/v / / \ / stress
Nature's first green is gold,
. section
. stanza
. part
. line
. . lobe
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. . . . tactus
.. . . . . . . . . . pulse

Line 2

_______________________
/ \ tone unit
w-a s-xr
_______________ ______
/ \/ \ phonological phrase
s-a w-xr
__________ __ _______
/ \/ \/ \ cliic phrase
w s w w s
\ / v / \ / stress
Her hardest hue to hold.
. line
. . lobe
. . . . tactus
. .. . . . . . . . . . pulse

Line 3

_________________________
/ \ tone unit
w-a s-xr
_______________ ________
/ \/ \ phonological phrase
s-a w-xr
_________ ____ _________
/ \/ \/ \ clitic phrase
w s w w sw
\ / v / v /v stress
Her early leaf's a flower;
. part
. line
. . lobe
. . . . tactus
. .. . . . . . . . . . pulse
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Line #4

___________________
/ \ tone unit
w s
___________ ______
/ \/ \ phonological phrase
s-a w-sr
______ _ ______
/ \/ \/ \ clitic phrase
w s w w sw
\ / v / v /v stress
But only so an hour.
. line
. . lobe
. . . . tactus
. .. . ... .. . . . pulse

In the first quatrain, this songlike relation between meter and grouping is also

extended up into higher levels of grouping and meter. Following the curves of energy in

the meter, the second and third lines echo the meaning of the first and second lines, while

at a lower level of grouping, the second and fourth lines introduce the textually more

important issue of the loss of first fruits and are therefore rhythmically stronger than the

first and third lines. This creates a rhythmic figure where the second and fourth lines

cadence the meter in the first and second metrical parts, but with the grouping contours
falling across the first stanza as a whole, conforming to the falling contours of the meter.

_____________________________________________________________
/ \
s w
________________________________ ____________________________
/ \/ \
w s w s
________________ ______________ _____________ ______________
/ \/ \/ \/ \
Nature's first... Her hardest... Her early... But only so...
. stanza
. . part
. . . . line
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The problem is: all of this close coordination between meter and grouping, body

and voice, goes to smash in the second quatrain--an event that delivers the major

rhythmic action of the poem. Unlike the meter-like symmetries of the first quatrain, the

higher level grouping of the second quatrain is wildly asymmetrical--effectively crushing

our perception of the higher level beating and its song-like coordination with the voice.

The fifth line, which also refers to the nature's leafing, strongly summarizes the point of

loss, and in a poignantly ironic way--Then leaf subsides to leaf; the references to the

parallel "falls" in Eden and dawn are delivered in only one line each, and without any

meter-like echoes; and then the final line summarizes the entire argument of the poem.

\ \ \ \ \ \
Nature's first green is gold, |w | | | | |
/ | | | | |
\ |s| | | |
Her hardest hue to hold. |s | | | | |
/ / |w| | |
\ \ | |w| |
Her early leaf's a flower; |w | | | | |
/ | | | |w|
\ |w| | | |
But only so an hour. |s | | | | |
/ / / | | |
\ \ \ | | |
Then leaf subsides to leaf. | | |s| | |
/ / / / | |
\ \ \ \ | |
So Eden sank to grief. | | | |w| |
/ / / / | |
\ \ \ \ | |
So dawn goes down to day. | | | |s| |
/ / / / / |
\ \ \ \ \ |
Nothing gold can stay. | | | | |s|
/ / / / / /

Or with the meter added, the following:

______________________________________________
/ \ level 9
w s
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________________________________________ ____
/ \/ \ level 8
w w s
____________________________ ____ ____ ____
/ \/ \/ \/ \ level 7
w s
______________________ ____ ____ ____ ____
/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \ level 6
s w
__________ __________ ____ ____ ____ ____
/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \ level 5
s w s w
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \ tone units
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 line#
. section
. . stanza
. . . . part
. . . . . . . . line

That is, in this second quatrain, grouping no longer cooperates smoothly with

meter; in fact, it doesn't even maintain its own symmetries. As the second quatrain tries to

begin with a strong beat, grouping delivers a strong peak and therefore cadences this

metrical action before it can begin. Then this happens again at a lower level in the

seventh line. Each of these cadencing gestures is also a radical grouping contraction,

giving the vocal motion in the text enormous gravity and shapelessness throughout the

second quatrain. In sum, the rhythmic song in the first quatrain becomes dissonant, if not

destroyed entirely. This dissonance is also augmented by the regular couplet rhymes,

which follow meter and support it, even as meter struggles against the asymmetrical

grouping. Of course, much else also changes in this second quatrain, and this will

eventually be our point. The string of parallel verbs that now appears--"subside," "sink,"

"go," "stay"--which are linear both grammatically and semantically, also underlines this

loss of rhythmic order between body and soul.

The asymmetries and dissonances in the second quatrain of "Nothing Gold Can

Stay" might also be attributed to prolongational forces. Prolongational forces in poetry

are the results of linear pressures at many levels of structure in language, but if we just
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had to summarize these forces in a short-hand way, we might see prolongational energies

as matching grouping energies in the first quatrain. The first and third lines anticipate the

second and fourth lines with a strong, conjunct motion: First gold, then loss of gold; first

flowers, then loss of flowers; with the third and fourth lines extending in a static,

adjunctive way, the introduction of this motif in the first two lines. But the odd fifth line,

which is both a strong grouping peak and strong metrical beat, extends this motif further.

albeit in a fairly static, adjunctive way. Then the mention of Eden and dawn extend the

motif further, now more vertically or subjunctively, into different contexts of human

experience; and the last line caps this vertical motion with a completely encompassing

statement of the motif--Nothing gold can stay. If we consider the opening mention of

Nature as anticipating this final generalization, as I think we might, then this final line

closes the poem.

If we label anticipations "a," extensions "e," and arrivals "r", and distinguish

among adjunctive, subjunctive, conjunctive, and disjunctive motion with the symbols "="

, "+", "x", and "-", respectively, this yields the following prolongational structure for

high-levels:

\ \ \ \ \ \
Nature's first green is gold, |a | | | | |
/ | | | | |
\ | | | | |
Her hardest hue to hold. | xr | | | | |
/ / | | | |
\ \ | | | |
Her early leaf's a flower; |a | | | | |
/ | | | |a|
\ | =e| | | |
But only so an hour. | xr | | | | |
/ / / | | |
\ \ \ | | |
Then leaf subsides to leaf. | | | =e| | |
/ / / / | |
\ \ \ \ | |
So Eden sank to grief. | | | | +e| |
/ / / / | |
\ \ \ \ | |
So dawn goes down to day. | | | | +e| |
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/ / / / / |
\ \ \ \ \ |
Nothing gold can stay. | | | | | +r|
/ / / / / /

In the second quatrain, these more asymmetrical prolongational rhythms crush

our perceptions of the high-level cycling of meter and distort the proportional divisioning

of grouping and its coordination with meter's cyclings; and this is very important to the

poem as a whole. Linear time is historical time, in human terms, the time, not of the body

and emotions, but of will and action. It is just this time that, within the cycles of nature,

drives golden leaves and dawn to darker leaves and a lesser day; and its just Eve's

willfulness that, in Christian cosmology, leads to our fall from Eden into the purgatorial

world of work.

As the poem turns into the second quatrain and the rhythm shifts into its linear

mode, the grammatical reflexes of these rhythms shift, too. Linguistically, the fifth line is

not rendered, say, "Nature's next gold turns green" but "Then leaf subsides to leaf." The

phrases contract and lose their modifiers and ordinals. The verb "subsides" is fronted and

stressed rather than the ordinal "first." The verb is no longer copular, but something else;

the adverbial subjunct "only" becomes a conjunct, "Then," and a prepositional phrase, "to

leaf," appears, whose complement is also more linear than centered or cyclical. This

shifted grammar is carried through rigorously to the end of the poem, capped by the

modal verb "can" in the last line, a grammatical item that is a multiple reflex of linear

time. In its two major meanings, "can" refers to our abilities, our willpower, and the

products of our will and abilities, our possibilities, and stands in high contrast with what

"must" and "should" be done, our bodily necessities and personal obligations.

As human beings, the poem says, we cannot resist the fall out of innocence and

lyric time into adulthood and less centered and stable linearities. Like all natural beings,

like dawn going down to day, we go from flower to leaf, from Eden to grief; and in that

fall we lose those precious first fruits of our childhood and adolescence.
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