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Nothing Gold Can Stay

By Robert Frost

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.
 

Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay" from New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1923. Public Domain.

Poet Bio

Portrait of smiling American poet Robert Frost, 1962. A cropped version of this photograph was used on the cover of the March 30, 1962, issue of Life magazine. (

Robert Frost is considered the bard of New England. Casual readers sometimes overlook the depth of his poetry and its technical accomplishment. His apparently simple poems — collected in volumes from A Boy’s Will to In the Clearing — reveal a darker heart upon close reading, and his easy conversational style is propelled by an unfaltering meter and an assiduous sensitivity to the sounds of language.

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