16 pages • 32 minutes read
Robert FrostNothing Gold Can Stay
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1923A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Robert Frost is often described as fusing the traditional poetic style of his 19th century predecessors with the innovation of his contemporaries. Frost, like Romantic poet William Wordsworth, focuses many of his poems on nature. A hallmark of Romantic poetry is its view on nature’s mutability, or the inevitability of change. Frost admired the use of fixed rhyme and meter of traditional poetry. He also revered the work of those Victorians, like Thomas Hardy, who turned an unsparing eye on the harsh realism of country life. With his focus on New England, Frost is considered an American regionalist and is particularly lauded for his ability to capture American idiom and dialect. Modernists often emphatically rejected elevated poetic diction to create more colloquial-sounding voices keeping with how people realistically spoke.
Unlike Frost, however, most Modernists wrote in blank verse and used fragmented line breaks to create emphasis and to mimic the fracturing of the modern age. Frost embraced imagery, but unlike T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, his symbolic references came from the public realm instead of his personal mindscape. A lyric and meditative poet, Frost’s poems do contain Modernist nihilistic tendencies toward bleak irony. The blending of the two types of poetry—the 19th century traditional form and the Modern viewpoint—makes Frost rather unique amongst his peers. “Nothing Gold Can Stay” uses traditional rhyme and meter, as well as the subject of nature’s mutability, but its succinctness mimics actual speech and questions the nature of man’s existence.
Historical Context
Frost studied the Romantic poets and was particularly influenced by the work of William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Wordsworth’s poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” has lines and thoughts to which Frost is deliberately responding in “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” In “Ode,” Wordsworth wrote, “nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour [sic] in the grass glory in the flower” (Lines 182-83). This sentiment aligning with Frost’s lines in “Nothing Gold Can Stay”: “Her early leaf’s a flower / but only so an hour” (Lines 3-4). Wordsworth offers a different strategy to loss, suggesting that man’s common experience offers community: “We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind; / In the primal sympathy / Which having been must ever be” (184-87). While Frost similarly notes the cyclical element of nature, his tone connotes feelings of loss, whereas Wordsworth’s tone is one of hope. While Frost’s poem is Romantic in subject, it is Modernist in tone.
Significant losses in Frost’s life inform the writing of “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” The poem follows “E. T.” in New Hampshire, which links the poems. “E. T.” is dedicated to his friend and poet Edward Thomas, who was killed in World War I. Frost considered Thomas to be a brother, and though they only knew each other for four years, Frost was devastated by Thomas’s death. The harshness of World War I affected many of his contemporaries and Frost would have been part of the conversation regarding the emotional aftereffects of what became known as the “war to end all wars.” Furthermore, Frost’s only sibling Jeanie was institutionalized for mental illness in 1920. Frost was riddled with guilt over the early deaths of two of his children and both he and his wife suffered bouts of depression. With its themes of inevitable change and the fleeting nature of innocence, “Nothing Gold Can Stay” directly stems from such tragic events.
Because of the simplicity of its rhyme scheme and meter, “Nothing Gold Can Stay” is easy to memorize and for decades, school children were asked to recite it, which bolstered its public popularity. It’s no wonder it continues to appear in song lyrics, cartoons, and popular literature. The lines appear in parts or whole in a variety of contemporary works. Authors S. E. Hinton and John Green use the poem in their respective young novels, The Outsiders (1967) and The Fault in Our Stars (2011), to iterate the poignancy of a young person’s death.
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