Felix Culpa-bility: Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

I. THE PROCESS OF REVISION

Robert Frost’s early draft of “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” which he sent to George R. Elliott in a letter dated March 1920, is two stanzas longer than the version we know. For a poem about the brevity of every state of being, the inability to cling to beauty amid its constant movement, and the value of glorious things gone too soon, Frost inevitably realized that a single, brief octave would not only suffice, but would better enact the themes of the poem through its form. In his revision, he not only tightened the poem but enhanced its themes through imagery that deepens the poem’s subtextual meaning.

The initial three-stanza version, “Nothing Golden Stays,” reads:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaves are flowers—
But only so for hours;
Then leaves subside to leaves.
In Autumn she achieves
A still more golden blaze
But nothing golden stays.

Of white, blue, gold and green,
The only colors seen
And thought of in the vast,
The gold is soonest past.
A moment it appears
At either end of years,
At either end of days.
But nothing golden stays.

In gold as it began
The world will end for man.
And some belief avow
The world is ending now.
The final age of gold
In what we now behold.
If so, we’d better gaze,
For nothing golden stays.

Frost kept only the first stanza from “Nothing Golden Stays”: the latter two stanzas he would later repurpose in the poem “It Is Almost the Year Two Thousand.” As is the nature of things, that singular stanza was transformed before its first publication in the Yale Review in 1923:

(Final poem)

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.

(First stanza, first draft)

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaves are flowers—
But only so for hours;
Then leaves subside to leaves.
In Autumn she achieves
A still more golden blaze
But nothing golden stays.

In tracking these changes, we see that the “golden” of the earlier version’s title and final line became “gold can” in the final poem. Unlike the word “golden” (an adjective meaning gold-like, either in terms of color or value), the word “gold” avoids comparisons, getting directly to the valuable source. There are lots of golden and gold-like objects, but gold is gold because of its scarcity. The addition of the word “can” serves the poem not only by formally keeping the rhythm of the meter, but also by thematically focusing the poem on the concept of capability. It’s not just that nothing gold stays; nothing gold even has the capability to stay. 

In the revision, stasis becomes even more of an impossibility. The “leaves,” “flowers,” and “hours” mentioned in lines three, four, and five all lost their plural in the edit, which further drives home the concept of scarcity through singularity. The biggest changes, though, came in lines six and seven, which were completely rewritten. Crucially, fall subsides to Fall. Frost lost his explicit reference to the season of fall, though hints of autumnal imagery remain in the cyclical processes described in the final version. Instead, he braided into the poem’s tight weave an allusion to theFall of Man: Eve’s tasting of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Original Sin in Christian theology, which sinks Eden to grief. This Biblical allusion—though only five words long and one single line—opens up the implications of the poem through the concept of felix culpa: a view of Original Sin as fortunate because it opened up the path to redemption.

II. NATURE’S FIRST IMPOSSIBLE COPULA

“Nothing Gold Can Stay” begins, as all things do, with nature. This prime mover is announced trochaically in the first word. Though a few city poems exist in Frost’s enormous oeuvre (“Acquainted with the Night” is perhaps the most famous), his Collected Poems depicts predominantly rural imagery, cataloging nature’s innumerable poses. Frost is often considered a “nature poet,” yet he claimed to have only written “three or four pure nature poems.” The vast majority of his output consists of what he labeled “human portraits with a nature setting.” 

Though the only character explicitly referenced in “Nothing Gold Can Stay” is nature herself, who finds gold “her hardest hue to hold,” the personification of nature implies an unspoken speaker who projects onto her what we can assume are their own personal desires and anxieties. Frost’s poems portray our encounters—or our “alien entanglements,” as he sometimes called them—with nature. These bosky rendezvous with “the other” often allow for some sort of epiphany, yet the epiphanic content only ever further complicates the world and our place within it; we never emerge from the dark fully enlightened.

The initial declaration about nature in “Nothing Gold Can Stay”—that “Nature’s first green is gold”—poses an interpretive problem. Many of Frost’s first lines court ambiguity through their peculiar syntax. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” the opening of “Mending Wall,” for example, allows the speaker and the reader to pack into that ambiguous “something” all manner of potential causes for the titular wall’s “gaps,” both physical and metaphysical, natural and supernatural. The beginning of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (“Whose woods these are I think I know”) phrases an assumption in a way that makes it sound more like a question than an answer. By comparison, “Nature’s first green is gold” may at first feel rather straightforward, but the impossibility of the copular clause complicates the matter.

A copular clause is a clause using a copula (usually a form of the verb “to be”) to connect a sentence’s subject to its subject complement. The copular clause that opens Frost’s poem is impossible because we know that green cannot literally be gold, just as blue cannot literally be red. This is a paradox, unless at least one of these colors is taken metaphorically. Thus, it can be helpful for readers who are trying to discern the meaning of such a line to start by coming up with a list of associations commonly pinned to each color. Green is often associated with nature, and through nature, with life, growth, fertility, and springtime. It can also be connected to money, value, luck, and jealousy. Interestingly, gold, like green, is a color often associated with value and money. Gold can also be connected to beauty, perfection, the Golden Age, god, autumn, and—through autumn—death. The word “first,” too, does not only have one meaning. We usually understand the word “first” to mean the initial thing in a sequence, but it can also imply best in terms of quality or foundational in terms of growth.

When you begin to mix and match the various associations, possible meanings of the poem’s first line sprout up like so many saplings from the vernal earth. For example, if you take “green” to be metaphorical for life or growth, you might say the line means that nature’s initial life/growth is gold-colored. This is quite literally true for a number of New England trees, like the birch and willow, which begin life not as green but as a yellowish gold. 

But it’s also possible to take the line in the opposite direction by imagining “gold” metaphorically and “green” literally. Then, the first line isn’t even about the color gold at all: nature’s initial green-growth is valuable/beautiful/perfect. If you take both “green” and “gold” as metaphors, then you might come up with the idea that nature’s initial life/growth (no matter its color, whether green, gold, or innumerable other shades) is valuable/beautiful/perfect.

Regardless of which of these interpretations of the line the reader settles on—not to mention the many other possibilities, which might include concepts such as jealousy, luck, or the Golden Age, and could even question, as Bill Clinton famously did, “what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”—a foundation of fecund topsoil is there in the poem’s opening to allow for the emergence of a whole network of growth. The opening line is beautiful and valuable precisely because of its seemingly infinite potential, an idea the poem will return to throughout its eight lines.

III. NATURE PERSONIFIED AND PATTERNED

The second line affects the potential of the first line and closes off some possibilities—or at least appears to. The line personifies nature by not only giving it a gender, but giving it a very human desire for stasis. With “Her hardest hue to hold,” the speaker implies that nature wants to grasp what is golden in order to stop it from changing or deteriorating. Here the use of the word “hue” may retroactively push some readers to go back and correct their analysis of the first line, narrowing the possibilities by assuming that it must be definitively discussing the color gold, but the poem will continually shift from literal images of the color gold to more general images of gold as value, so the “hue” may not be as definitive a clue as it at first seems. Everything slips in this poem the harder you try to hold it to a particular meaning.

The repetition of the “h” sound in the second line shows the poem holding—or, rather, attempting to hold—something beautiful: the alliteration itself. This enacts the thematic argument of the line. The first three words of the line hold that “h” sound, but the fourth loses it. The fifth word returns to the “h” sound, and the poem is able to hold it across the line break for one more word, but inevitably this too shall pass. Nothing “h” can stay? (In a way, the “h” sound is the first green of speech in that it is the sound of breath before being articulated into other speech sounds.)

Though we are just two lines in, we might pause here to notice that these first two lines of the poem are heavily end-stopped; so too will the remaining six be. This makes the lines seem to exist almost as independent units, but their potential independence is hampered by the rhyme scheme, which forces each thought into a pairing. These couplets, like the hard to hold “h” sounds of the second line, are examples of a beauty that quickly transforms into something else. The AABBCCDD rhyme scheme mirrors the perpetual movement found in nature, from one state to the next.

Though the end-stopped units have been bonded into pairs, these can themselves be separable from one another, since the rhymes never repeat. But rhyme and enjambment are not the only tools a poet has to connect lines together. Other patterns emerge through syllable stresses and repeated phonemes, which bind each of these units into a tight weave. For example, the second line and second-to-last line echo each other in their alliterations: “hardest, “hue,” and “hold” are reflected in “dawn,” “down,” and “day.” The trochaic interference of the iambic trimeter pattern in the first line’s first word (“Nature’s”) is reproduced by the headless final line with its truncated foot.

Likewise, the syntactic pattern of the first line (possessive => adjective => noun => verb => noun) is repeated in the third line: “Her early leaf’s a flower.” Though the “gold” that ends the first line could actually be either noun or adjective, with the third line, the pattern is solidified in the noun “flower,” just as the image of the potential flower will be solidified into leaf. Not only does the form of the impossible copular clause return—for just as green cannot actually be gold, so too is a leaf not truly a flower—but the adjectives of each line mirror one another in content: “first” and “early.” Once again, we can take this line to have multiple meanings. On the one hand, if the initial foliole is golden-hued, it may seem more flower-like than leaf-like. On the other hand, the leaf before it becomes a leaf begins as a bud, much like a flower. Thus, the early leaf, in the form of a bud, appears to have the potential to grow into a flower.

The fourth line, “But only so an hour,” shrinks seasonal time into diurnal time. Rather than the early leaf taking a season to mature into full flower, its original potential lasts but a brief moment. Against the deep time of geological nature (and, as will become important later, the mythic span of Biblical tradition), these processes slip by imperceptibly.

IV. GRAVITATIONAL PULL

We have now reached the halfway point of the poem, and here a transition takes place. The first four lines seem to view nature’s glass as half full by focusing on images of beautiful potential: the infinite possibilities inherent in first growth, in early states, in nascency. But this surface optimism is undergirded by hints of lament, particularly in nature’s futile grasp in the second line and in the melancholy use of the word “only” in the fourth line. By contrast, the final four lines of the poem seem to see nature’s glass as half empty because their gravitational pull is ever downward, as displayed in the verb choices of lines 5, 6, and 7: “subsides,” “sank,” and “goes down.” This surface pessimism, like the surface optimism of the first four lines, is similarly contradicted by a subtle tonal countercurrent in which each apparent descent is not as bleak as it may first seem.

To start, “Then leaf subsides to leaf” breaks free of the impossible copular clause pattern of the previous two odd-numbered lines: “leaf” and “leaf” are, quite obviously, equals. Though “subsides” implies a lessening, there is no such impoverishment, for the loss is merely substitution or replacement rather than depletion or depreciation.

If the first four lines are all of a single image, the first golden growth of a leaf-bud, which has the potential to become a flower, before it becomes what it was destined to be (a leaf), then the fifth line details that becoming: proto-leaf becoming leaf. Aside from its flower possibility, which of course was never a possibility at all, the early golden leaf-growth becoming a full green leaf as the spring progresses and moves into summer is only a subsidence if corruption and entropy are co-emergent with life.

V. IF DESIGN GOVERN IN A THING SO … LARGE?

In reading the first five lines of the poem, you’d be forgiven for wondering what the purpose of focusing on such small-scale diminishments is. Is the design the speaker sees in the patterns of nature’s losses meaningful? By way of answer, we might turn to Frost’s poem “Design” and imagine “Nothing Gold Can Stay” ending with a similar thematic proclamation: “If design govern in a thing so small.” But the sudden imposition of “So Eden sank to grief” in line six instead gives the microcosmic imagery macrocosmic weight.

Looking at the previous line from the wider view of seasonal cycles, leaf subsiding to leaf is what happens every year when old leaves wither and die and are replaced months later by new post-hibernal growth. Thus, in the final version of this poem, autumnal imagery is no longer the premier image of the fall, for the fall predates leaves turning gold (and orange and red) and falling to the ground in their death. Their fall has already happened in their turning green with life.

By using the word “So” at the start of line six, Frost is creating a relationship between the minutial processes in nature whereby “leaf subsides to leaf” and the monumental Fall in the Bible whereby “Eden sank to grief.” The “So …” could imply merely that Eden’s sinking is comparable to the subsiding leaves. In other words, “so too” did this happen, which is a relationship of resemblance. But “So …” could also imply that Eden’s sinking happened because “leaf subsides to leaf.” Interestingly, there is an inversion here because in the classic Christian perspective the cause-effect relationship would be flipped: leaf subsides to leaf because of Eve’s original sin. But here that change is intrinsic to existence; Eden’s supposed perfection necessitated a diminution. Eden had to change because all things subside to other things. The original sin didn’t cause the Fall; the natural imperative for entropy or alteration caused even that original sin.

It’s also possible that the “So Eden sank to grief” is not a literal description of the Genesis story, but a metaphor comparing the small-scale leaf subsiding to more large-scale decline of bucolic settings. It’s not just Eden itself that is perpetually lost. As Marcel Proust put it, “everyparadise is a paradise lost.” “Every” implies that there are more paradises than Eden—more edens than Eden. So the Eden of this poem need not be the Eden, but could be one of the brief lesser-edens that populate our world. Frost describes one such idyllic scene in the poem “A Winter Eden,” where the word “Eden” merely describes “A winter garden in an alder swamp,” not the Biblical Eden. (Reading “A Winter Eden” next to “Nothing Gold Can Stay” can be quite fruitful, for the images of each quickly find correspondences in the other.)

VI. HAPPY FALLS AND BEAUTIFUL BREAKDOWNS

Whether the Eden referenced is the Eden or an eden, the surface implication of this allusion is that even in the life cycle of a trivial leaf exists the entire history of the Fall of Man; thus, each part of nature, each individual expression of it, implies a Monistic whole (which is a synecdochic relationship). Frost’s leaf-as-synecdoche schtick is borrowed from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who saw in “every leaf an exponent of the world.” Yet underneath the line’s glaze of Emersonian Monism, there is a tension between its Biblical allusion and the other seven lines, for Eden is the only image in the poem whose temporal trajectory is linear rather than cyclical. Eden, according to the Bible, is never intended to be returned to (Genesis 3:24). This breakdown in correspondence is more indicative of metaphor than synecdoche.

“All metaphor breaks down somewhere,” Frost wrote. “That is the beauty of it.” The Eden trope does not have a perfect 1-to-1 correlation with the annual, seasonal, and diurnal patterns that dominate the rest of the poem, though that itself only reenacts the line’s thematic drag: metaphor—both in general and in this specific instance—sinks, like Eden, to grief. The imperfection, the dissolution, is wherefrom beauty emerges. This is an example of the theological concept of felix culpa: “the happy fall.” Even the Fall of Man, the most seemingly unfortunate event in the Christian universe, can be seen to enable fortunate outcomes. The ultimate consequence of the Fall is the redemption of mankind through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Expanding on this worldview, St. Thomas Aquinas argued that “God allows evil to happen in order to bring a greater good therefrom.”

The poem’s seventh line—“So dawn goes down to day”—makes this irony clear as, well, day. Frost argued that “In poetry and under emotion every word is ‘moved’ a little or much—moved from its old place, heightened, made, made new.” He pointed to John Keats’s use of the word “alien” in “Ode to a Nightingale”: “She stood in tears amid the alien corn.” Frost’s own use of the word “down” in this poem is made similarly new and alien.

Dawn is usually thought of in terms of a different trajectory—upward movement. In Frost’s use of “down” to represent dawn’s relation to day, the rising sun, like one side of a scale, forces the dawn itself downward. The possibility symbolized by the aesthetic splendor of a glorious sunrise, when gold glints across the horizon, is contingent upon the dawn’s diminishment; after all, it is actually day—not dawn—that affords new opportunity. Thus, only in the dying of the dawn can the potential within the dawn come to pass in the same way that the promise of the early yellowish sapling needs its greenification to come to fruition.

VII. SOMETHING LOST, SOMETHING GAINED

If indeed these images are images of loss, they are losses that allow for great gains: in the disappearance of the golden seedling and bud, we get the full flower of springtime greenery; in the Fall of Man is the emergence of the human race, our postlapsarian natural world, and the prospect of our redemption; and only in the descent of dawn can there arrive the great possibilities of the day. If the poem is about the need to appreciate the fleeting moment, it seems silly to spend that moment being nostalgic, lamenting past losses, and not appreciating the thing that is currently being lost before our very eyes.

The concept of felix culpa proves that the loss, the fall—all change, in fact—is neither bad nor good, except that human valuation makes it so. It merely is. Nature is movement. Nature is unholdable. Nature is the nothing that is. The fall is perceived rather than actual: the flower-like bud becomes the leaf it always was destined to be and the dawn becomes the day that its first light naturally heralded.

The gravitational pull in the poem, ever downward, is a human value judgment, not a universal one. These images of going down, subsiding, and sinking are entirely anthropocentric. The sun, whose emergence on the horizon creates dawn, of course does not move up or down; we merely experience such directional movement from our human perspective. Even the loss of Eden is glimpsed from a human view, through grief, and particularly a grief in the past. “Sank” is the only past-tense verb in the poem. All the others are happening and continue to happen, daily, seasonally, eternally, but Eden already has happened. All humanity can do is imagine an Eden that preexisted it. Every paradise is a paradise lost.

VIII. THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge, though never explicitly mentioned in the poem, is key to understanding it. Knowing that change is inevitable, that loss is innate, brings disappointment. Knowledge is the fall. Yet it is also knowledge that allows for the appreciation of the loss. Our knowledge that a flower is fleeting increases its value. So too does dawn’s desirability increase due to our knowledge of its transitory nature. With knowledge comes the pain of loss, but through knowledge we find the value of things.

The eighth and final line of the poem repeats the title: “Nothing gold can stay.” The truncated foot in the final line may push the reader to elongate the “o” in “gold” to make it two syllables. Not only does this turn “gold” into “go-old” (and hint at time and aging), but more importantly it makes the final line better mirror the meter of the first line (trochee/spondee/iamb). Through alliteration, rhyme, and syntactic structure, patterns continually emerge in the poem, but each pattern falls. Nothing patterned can stay, unless of course the breaking of pattern becomes its own pattern.

By ending with the title, Frost makes explicit in the form what has been implicit in the imagery: everything is cyclical. Thus, as the poem ends it begins again, with the last line becoming the title. Each dawn may go down to day, but a different dawn will return in only so many hours. Loss is only permanent in each specific case.

While the poem seems nostalgic in a sort of grass-is-always-golder way, there is also a contrary strain of appreciation in the supposed diminishment. If the reader takes the word “gold” in the first line to mean the color, then by the last line the word “gold” is now certainly expanded to encompass all things of value—which, of course, is all things, for everything has potential for value from the human perspective, just as everything will inevitably be lost (leaf as much as flower, day as much as dawn, green as much as gold).

In the end, the poem promotes two opposing temporal understandings of the universe: one is linear and downward, the other is cyclical and circular. The poem is simultaneously about how everything degenerates in this entropic universe and about how everything recurs in this cyclical universe. Though these epiphanies are at odds with one another, they coexist in the poem in seemingly complimentary fashion. The cyclical emerges from the entropic and the entropic emerges from the cyclical. What these have in common is what is most important: change is inevitable, destruction is inherent in creation, and potential is valuable—at least from a human perspective—but value can only ever be understood through loss. Perpetual loss is all we know on Earth, and all we need to know. If “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” then every gold is a gold lost.

Activity: Color in Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay"