Nothing Gold Can Stay (poem)

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" is a short poem by Robert Frost, written in 1923 and published in The Yale Review in October of that year.

It was later published in the collection New Hampshire (1923),[1] which earned Frost the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The poem lapsed into public domain in 2019.[2] New Hampshire also included Frost's poems "Fire and Ice" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening".

Reception Alfred R. Ferguson wrote of the poem, "Perhaps no single poem more fully embodies the ambiguous balance between paradisiac good and the paradoxically more fruitful human good than 'Nothing Gold Can Stay,' a poem in which the metaphors of Eden and the Fall cohere with the idea of felix culpa."[3]

John A. Rea wrote about the poem's "alliterative symmetry", citing as examples the second line's "hardest – hue – hold" and the seventh's "dawn – down – day"; he also points out how the "stressed vowel nuclei also contribute strongly to the structure of the poem" since the back round diphthongs bind the lines of the poem's first quatrain together while the front rising diphthongs do the same for the last four lines.[3]

In 1984, William H. Pritchard called the poem's "perfectly limpid, toneless assertion" an example of Frost demonstrating how "his excellence extended also to the shortest of figures", and fitting Frost's "later definition of poetry as a momentary stay against confusion."[3]

In 1993, George F. Bagby wrote the poem "projects a fairly comprehensive vision of experience" in a typical but "extraordinarily compressed" example of synecdoche that "moves from a detail of vegetable growth to the history of human failure and suffering."[3]