2
Dec
2009
FreeVerse: Nothing Gold Can Stay
Recently I was telling some friends that the only poem I have memorized is “Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost.
I’m a big Robert Frost fan. In 8th grade I wrote a paper on him all in rhyming couplets.
But this is my favorite. And it was also my first introduction to him, having read it first in The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton:
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 dawn to day
Nothing gold can stay.
Unfortunately, YouTube does not seem to have just the scene where Ponyboy reads Johnny’s letter explaining the poem, so skip ahead to around 3:25 for it:
Still better than anything I could say.
OMG! I too love Robert Frost. One of these days I’m going to figure out how to vlog and read “Departmental.” I wrote my AP English poetry paper on Frost and convinced my parents I needed the complete works. I still have that book. My mom’s fav is “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
Too funny, we just talked about this poem in school. Had a whole socratic on in actually. It took us two days to get the real meaning, we all thought it was finding the good in the overlooked.
Oh, I just picked out a copy of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” to show to the toddlers at work — the one illustrated by Susan Jeffers. I love that poem so much. And this one! I had forgotten that I first encountered it in The Outsiders. My homeroom teacher read The Outsiders to us when I was in grade seven, and I can still hear his voice saying that poem. Lovely choice!
I forgot how cheesy (and loud music) was in 1980’s films! Still, it was a great movie. One of my favorite Frost poems is “The Road Not Taken.” Whenever I get down on myself for being kind of weird, I read that poem and I always feel a little better.
I love this one, and also – I can’t think of the name – the one about people looking at the sea. “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep”? I love the stanza that says “The land may vary more / But wherever the truth may be / The water comes ashore / and the people look at the sea”. (Hopefully I’ve not got that all wrong.)
I love memorising poetry! I did it quite frequently in high school (on my own, not for school), and then studying Russian at college we had to memorise quite a bit of it. I wish it would come back into the US education system.
I love this poem. And you want to know how I recently heard it? In a Baby Einstein video about colors!!!
i think my favorite of his is Fire and Ice.