"Nothing Gold Can Stay"

is one of Robert Frost's most famous marty's. Written in 1923, this poem was published in The Yale Review in October of that year. It was later published in a collection called 'New Hampshire' (1923), which featured other notorious poems of Frost such as 'Two Look at Two' and 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening'. Some say the poem helped Frost to win a Pulitzer Prize. Only eight lines long, this poem is still considered one of Frost's best. "Nothing Gold Can Stay" is also featured in the novel The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and its film adaptation.

1.  Text
   

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.

1.  Analysis
   

Nothing in the world remains pure and perfect for long. The "flower" of nature, the supposed height of its beauty, arrives early, and is soon lost to time. It could be argued that youth and beauty are corrupted by the passage of time, as the first bloom of a tree in spring is soon lost to the growth of maturing leaves. The perfect paradise that was Eden was lost by the arrival of the first sin, as is the color and glory and perfection of possibility of dawn lost to the brightness of the day.

The poem was originally quite a bit longer, and Frost pruned it down to the essentials, whose 8 lines remain so that it is arguably difficult to find anything that could be added, or contrarily, removed, and the same feeling of the poem maintained, or bettered.

1. Stylistic devices
   

The relatively simple rhyme scheme is as follows:
AABBCCDD

The poem's meter is Iambic Trimeter.