Nothing Gold Can Stay

Robert Frost’s poem ‘Nothing Gold can Stay’ was written in 1923, I will be analysing the poem by determining the significance of its rhyme and rhythm, vocabulary, and lexical semantics. I will also be looking at the Six Key Functions linguistic model by Roman Jakobson, specifically The Poetic Function in relation to Frost’s poem ‘Nothing Gold can Stay’. Furthermore I will be observing how, in ‘Nothing Gold can Stay’, “Poetic language may violate or deviate from generally observed rules of language in many different ways,” and how this subsequently alters the meaning of the poem (Leech 2013: 5). By breaking down the poem in such a way I hope to present a new approach in viewing the meaning, and to uncover the questions as to why the poem is

This is most evident in the first line “Nature’s first green is gold,” the emphasis on “gold” is reinforced in the second line with its rhyming couplet “hold”, gold has connotations of wealth and value and this semantically aligns with “first” which signifies importance. “Gold” is repeated in the final line which creates a cyclical effect to the poem, Frost may have done this to continue the theme of nature. The rhyming couplets are further supported by the poem being in Iambic trimeter, with the stressed beat on the line

The superlative therefore gives additional meaning to the line, if we assume “hue” is a further reference to the “gold” in line 1, then line 2 gives connotations of the “hue” being rare and maybe fleeting. The alliteration of the voiceless fricative /h/, when read aloud, creates a smooth, almost breathy, sound. This could be to emphasise the frailty of the “gold” as it is “hard to hold” and therefore could almost blow away. The next use of alliteration is in line 7, with the voiced plosive /d/, “So dawn goes down to day” which is the opposite of line 2, it has harsh beats, with the iambic stress falling on “dawn”, “down” and “day”, the same technique seen in line 2. However the impact of /d/ gives an almost angry sound to the sentence, this may be to reflect the meaning of the oxymoron “dawn goes down” as though time is reversing, here the reader could perceive the “gold” of the final line as the sun. Frost’s choice of the possessive female pronoun “Her” in lines 2 and 3, presumably refer to “Nature” in line 1. But this personified figure of nature isn’t referred to again in the poem. The view of nature as a female entity has been repeated throughout history, the mother figure reinforces the idea