First published in Yale Review Publication date October 1923 (1923-10) | Country USA | |
"Nothing Gold Can Stay" is a 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; copyright renewed 1951) that earned Frost the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. New Hampshire also included Frost's poems "Fire and Ice" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."
Contents
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."
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.
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."
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."
In popular culture
The poem is featured in both the 1967 novel The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton and the 1983 film adaptation, recited aloud by the character Ponyboy to his friend Johnny. In a subsequent scene Johnny quotes a stanza from the poem back to Ponyboy through a letter right after he dies.
Nothing Gold Can Stay is the name of the debut studio album by American pop-punk band New Found Glory, released on October 19, 1999.
Becca, the daughter of main character Hank Moody, recites the poem in the opening scene of "Girls, Interrupted", the seventh episode in the first season of the tv series Californication. The episode first aired on September 24, 2007.
The poem is referenced in First Aid Kit's 2014 album Stay Gold: "But just as the moon it shall stray/So dawn goes down today/No gold can stay/No gold can stay."