Robert Frost- Nothing Gold can stay: A reflection

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Hey world,

So. It's September, Autumn has come at last, (my favourite season), and it's time for the trees to be set alight by the dying sun...and an appropriate reflection. 🍂

In honour of this crisp season, I have decided to blog on Robert Frosts 'Nothing Gold Can Stay.'


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.

When I first read this I was slightly confused. This poem is deeper than I thought. You have to dig it up. Get your hands into it, get it under your nails. Eventually after crunching over it in my mind I decided it was saying that nothing lasts forever. But again I questioned this. See, I like to think that some things do last forever, things like love, kindness, and hope. I like to think that love lives on even after death or separation, echoing through time forever. But I know, that in reality such survivals are rare. In her novel The Outsiders (my next read), S. E. Hinton explains, via her teenage protagonist Ponyboy Curtis, that this poem is warning that when youth falls away, so too does innocence.

Frost tells us that nothing stays the same; everything is always changing. I guess I do agree with this too. For example, look outside: it's fall. The trees are slowly turning from green to brown, gold to rust. This annual change of seasons is a prime example of things changing. People like to think that love lasts forever like in fairy tales, but look closer. We would all consider love to be gold, but love doesn't last forever. It is always changing. It is rare. The harsh reality is, very few people actually fall in love and live happily ever after. Friendships may be made and then torn apart, families come together and are then split up by the destructive rhythm of our hearts. People are happy together but then their loved ones leave or die and dissapear. Nothing gold can stay.

Plato pointed this same idea out in his Cratylus dialogue:

"Heraclitus, I believe, says that all things go and nothing stays, and comparing existents to the flow of a river, he says you could not step twice into the same river"


Here Plato likens life to a river. Constantly in motion, never still, always changing. In the context of autumn, the trees exist in a routine of life, a pattern. Each Autumn their leaves turn gold, they fall down, leaving the trees naked and bare, but then spring comes and the leaves return.

There are similar ideas in Buddhism: Anatta -'no permanent self', and Anicca-'everything changes'. So you see the idea of nothing staying the same goes back even farther than Plato. Buddhism takes it further by ironically having the teachings of Anatta and Anicca contained within a story of a tree, that changed colour as the year went on.This story is called 'The Red Bud Tree' for anyone who is interested.🌳🍂

Basically it is about some princes who go riding into the forest, one at a time. The first one comes across a magnificent tree with delicate red buds. He returns and tells his brothers of this incredible tree. The next brother goes into the woods in search of this tree, but instead finds a tree with bright green leaves. Then the rest of the brothers go into the woods to see the tree, but each claim the tree to be of a different colour. Eventually the brothers went to their father the king and explained their dilema (they obviously weren't very smart), and the king laughed, shook his head, and said "My sons, you have all seen the same tree."

The Buddha believed that you can never be the exact same person from day to day. I do agree with this, but I don't think that your heart or soul changes too much. We may change on the outside, getting older and wiser; but the power of love never dies. Inside, we all have hearts of gold. But circumstance changes this; unkindness or bad experience or love gone bad can turn the heart cold and bitter. But then again, according to Frost: Nothing gold can stay.

I believe that in the shadows of today, we should look forward to tomorrow, where there might be gold. And one day, it will stay.


Stay gold, world.

A.H 🐝

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