Her hardest hue to hold.

Line 2

Her hardest hue to hold.

Ø  Now that our speaker has told us that nature is gold before it's green, he goes on to say that gold is the hardest hue, or color, for nature to hold, or keep. So the first color we see in spring doesn't stick around very long.

Ø  The idea of nature having an easy or hard time holding onto something is an example of personification. And not only is nature personified here, it's actually made into a female figure.

Ø  You know what else we notice about this line? Check out all those H sounds. That's some major alliteration right there. And it this short line, all those rapid-fire H sounds right in a row force us to slow down and really ponder over the meaning.

Ø  Then there's the rhyme. Hold rhymes with gold, which means we've got a rhymed couplet here.

And since these lines have the same number of syllables, we're gonna go ahead and assume there's a meter in play, too. In fact, there is—iambic trimeter, to be precise. Be sure to click on over to our "Form and Meter" section for more.

Line 3

Her early leaf's a flower;

The speaker wants to be clear here, so he's going to elaborate on what he was talking about in Line 1. Just like nature's first green is gold, her first leaf is a flower. In spring, trees and bushes bloom with gorgeous flowers, which are replaced by green leaves in the summer.

Frost is really getting into his poetic groove here, when he pops a metaphor into this line. The first flowers of spring aren't actually leaves in disguise; the speaker is using figurative language to intentionally blur the line between flowers and leaves. Eventually, in real life, the blooms die and drop off the trees, making room for the leaves, which come to soak in nourishment from the sun.

Line 4

But only so an hour.

This line completes the alternating structure of the first four lines. If nature's first green, gold, doesn't stick around long, then it only makes sense that the first version of the leaf, which is the flower, doesn't stick around long either.

As the speaker says in this handy rhyme, the first leaf is a flower for only an hour. This doesn't literally mean that the trees or plants the speaker is referring to bloom for exactly an hour. But blooms, as you'll know if you've ever gardened, only last a few days, or weeks, depending on the plant.

Or, Frost could be talking about how, when the sun comes up, everything is golden and flower-like. But then, when the sun gets high in the sky and everything becomes its normal color, what once looked like golden flowers now look like what they truly are—green leaves.

Line 5

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

This line shows us what happens after the early leaf is no longer figuratively a flower—it becomes a true leaf. But the speaker doesn't say "becomes," he says "subsides." This means that the first leaf sank down, or settled, to become another leaf.

The use of the word "subsides" implies that the speaker thinks that the first leaf—the flower of sorts—was better than the actual leaf. The first leaf had to stoop down, or lower itself, to become the second one.

Going with our two interpretations, this means that either spring blooms and flowers are more beautiful than the full leaves of summer, or that leaves in the early morning are much prettier than leaves at, say, midday.