Poetry Analysis: "Nothing Gold Can Stay", by Robert Frost

But nothing golden stays: An analysis of “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, by Robert Frost.

The year is 1923 and "Nothing Gold Can stay" rises to publication in "The Yale Review", in the month of October. Robert Frost wins a Pulitzer Prize. The poem is  featured in a novel by S. E. Hinton called "The Outsiders". (1)

What is so remarkable about this piece of poetry?

:”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. (2)

We are all familiar with the saying. "All that glitters is not gold."

Alfred R. Ferguson suggests that there has been a revision in the original piece of poetry and that the following lines were included in the copy of the poem that was sent to George R. Elliott, in March, 1920.

The last three lines are not the same. They read, (3)

In autumn she achieves
A still more golden blaze
But nothing golden stays. (4)

But does it make a difference in the poetry itself? It does, if one is referring to the Garden of Eden and the fall of man. It seems the poem has been rewritten, as the original poem reads,:

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.
In autumn she achieves
A still more golden blaze
But nothing golden stays.

Taking the first five lines of the poem and placing them with the last three of the other version, creates a poem that only refers to nature and not to Eden.

Can a poet take that kind of a liberty with his or her work, as it appears that Robert Frost has done? Is there not something sacred about a poem once it has been written? Should any poet be able to revise his or her poetry, at will? What if it changes the signification or the context of the poetry?

There are five, other copies of the poem still in existence and the nature version appears to be the original piece of poetry.

One might ask why Robert Frost made the change. 

Did he suddenly undergo some kind of a conversion, where he understood the Biblical significance of the felix culpa, or the fall of man, after he had already written this poem, which appears to have been referring only to nature?

It is more than an interesting happenstance. It appears that Frost, after focusing on nature and nature's reality, may have come to understand the Biblical account of creation, as recorded in the Bible.

One can take the meter, the rhythm and the rhyme and play with it forever, but that is not where the elegance and the mystery is realized in this piece of poetry. It is in the sudden, elevated conscious awareness or the manifestation of divine consciousness by the poet, whose personal transition from unbelief to belief is documented, in his own words.

Is it possible to focus on nature and come to understand God? Yes, God can be known, in many ways.

Perhaps in some way, Robert Frost has found the true gold, as the gold that glittered in his original poetry was merely a reflection of God, not God Himself, as revealed in the revision.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Gold_Can_Stay_(poem)

(2) Ibid.

(3) http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/gold.htm

(4) Ibid.