ANALYSIS SOUND CHECK
Frost doesn't just rely on boring old meter and rhymes to make music in this one. He's got alliteration, assonance, consonance, and slant rhymes up the wazoo to add some flavor to the mix.
We'll walk you through a few examples:
Line 2: Her hardest hue to hold. Um, alliteration much? Check out all those H's.
Line 3: Her early leaf's a flower; All those L's? Totally consonance, and totally awesome.
Lines 5 and 6: Then leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief. We've got the long E's of leaf, Eden and grief for a healthy dose of assonance and internal rhyme.
Line 7: So dawn goes down to day. Dawn and down? Shmoop smells slant rhyme.
All these little sonic moments make this poem an echo chamber of sorts, with repetition in more than just its imagery. We're constantly being reminded of the poem's meaning with these clever repetitions, and they only enhance the fleetingness of the poem, as the silence when we're done is all the more deafening for it's lack of music.
ANALYSIS WHAT'S UP WITH THE TITLE?.
The title and last line are general enough that we can think of this poem metaphorically. We can picture Michael Phelps looking at his gold medals in 2050 and missing the athleticism that faded into old age. Or an old movie star, looking in the mirror at her wrinkled face, missing the golden days of youth. We can see a teenager, packing up her bags to go to college, worried about student loans and whether or not she's going to make it academically, missing the days when she was a little kid, when mom and dad took care of everything.
So yes, gold the metal can actually stay gold for a while, but the golden things in life, the speaker suggests with this title, always seem to fade away.
A. SOURCES
Ø "Language and Form in 'Nothing Gold Can Stay.'" Robert Frost: studies of the poetry. Ed. Kathryn Gibbs Harris. G.K. Hall & Co, 1979. Copyright © 1979 by Katheryn Gibbs Harris.
Ø The Poems of Robert Frost: an explication. Copyright © 1991 by Mordecai Marcus.
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