Nothing Gold Can Stay

By Robert Frost

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 is one of the most famous poems by Robert Frost.
The poem appeared for the first time in a collection called New Hampshire, collection that
won the 1924 Pulitzer Prize.
This poem uses the ending of spring to examine the life itself and the fact that everything is
ephemeral. Surely, everything is presented with metaphors.

A principal theme of the poem is the fading life of nature and of life itself. As even the title
mentions, nothing can stay gold, everything that is beautiful or delightful is ephemeral.
Everything that is good and beautiful must come to an end.

As the poem says, even The Garden of Eden sinks to grief when the leaves are falling, a
metaphor that can suggest that even the Divine Power is in sorrow as the beautiful things fade
away from their beauty.

In this case, the comparison between the gold, as a precious metal and golden and precious
things in our life is useless, as everything, in a given moment, will fade away.

Nothing Gold Can Stay introduces us the idea of the short life of any beautiful thing in our
life, making us value every second that we have left in this ephemeral life.
 Fire and Ice

By Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

The poet talks here about destruction and, if we take a closer look, even for self
destruction.
He sees the end of the world from two perspectives, the death by fire and the
death by ice. If we look at the poem for the first time, we can think that he
speaks about a natural disaster but it isn’t the situation and the case, comparing
the two natural causes with human abilities and natures.
Frost places fire in the same context as with desire, making an allegory out of
these two terms, evidencing in this way the power and the destructive nature
that humans tend to aspire to.
Working in the same way as with fire, Frost continues with the allegory of ice
and hate, believing that by this, the world can end more than once and by the
hate accumulated by people, it can spread much more silently that the explosion
of destruction, the explosion of fire.
Taking a closer look at the end of the poem we can judge that these two
elements aren’t, after all, so different from each other, as both of them are a sign
of destruction, but seen from different angles and different perspectives,
working in different ways, more violently or more silent, depending on the
accumulation of the human nature or habit.
Dust of Snow

The way a crow

Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

In this poem we can see how little things can change your whole day and whole
mood, things as simple as some flakes of snow that can fall on you out of
nowhere, distracting you from the negative thoughts and emotions that went
with you all day long.
In the same idea, the chill of the cold snow that fell over can also be a sign of
changing the mood, as the low temperature gave a spark of reality, reality that
the poet got out of, being captive by his state of mind, by his negative behaviour
over his whole body.
By this spark of reality, a “rued” day, an awful day changed its course and the
poet’s state of mind just by some cold, chilling flakes, symbolizing the little
things that can bring the human being out of its state of mind.

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