Nothing Gold

This is the one I'm watching closely on my walks this coming week. The last springs we've been here, I've missed the early signs, but now that I'm free to roam in the mornings, I've managed to catch the first buds emerging. These little yellow flowers, you see, are in fact the early leaf of the bush. For a short while, it will be covered in them, dazzling me in the morning sun, and then subside to green leaves for the rest of the year.


This, too, is the precursor to leaves, delicate and so transitory they are easy to miss each year if you aren't watching.



I took the above pictures last week and already most of the blooms have turned to leaves. This week, the "flower" part is almost gone and it appears as thought dozens of red butterflies cover the branches. I never got to see this up close in Texas since we didn't have any of these kind of blooming trees. Or, if we did, I just missed them entirely. It's given me a greater appreciation of "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.

Everyone "knows" this poem. Most of my generation connects it to The Outsiders, with the dreadful recitation by Pony Boy.

Whenever I would teach Robert Frost, my mainstays were "Mending Wall," "Birches," "The Road Not Taken," "Fire and Ice," and "Nothing Gold Can Stay." I'd add different ones each semester to keep it fresh, but these five were the foundation. Since it's now been years, I'm kind of missing thinking about these poems in that classroom analytical way.

Look at this one. Every line end-stopped, every word single or double syllables, eight lines in iambic tetrameter with rhyming couplets: so simple on the page. It's easy to sing-song your way through the poem and just move on without letting it break through.

Look at that alliteration! Looks how he's worked the "s" through the center like a serpent in Eden. I won't bore you with how tight and brilliant the diphthongs work. But it's there for the linguists to discover.

The paradoxical quality of green as gold, leaf as flower, dawn going down -- it's all about subsiding but not, paradoxically, subsistence. Instead, there's a sense of what replaces all this transient perfection is somehow a felix culpa, a fortunate fall.

The words "sink" and "subside" lend credence to this idea of falling, but what does the leaf go down to? Another gold, another flower, another leaf... The cycle goes down only to come up again. Death to rebirth. Lines one and eight are imperfect iambs -- the beginning and the end mirror each other.

Now throw Eden into the mix and you've got the idea. Paradise lost will become paradise regained, but grief is a necessary component. And it's all naturally fractal -- from the tiny buds of the tree to the weight of humanity and cosmology. Like Emerson who pointed out that every leaf was an exponent of the world, or his student Thoreau who sees that the beautiful bug in the apple-wood table as proof of the immortality of the soul, Frost sees the world in a grain of sand.

(Credit to Rea's amazing work on the structural gems of the poem and to Bagby for the Transcendentalist connections.)