Both Gladiator and Nothing Gold Can Stay examine aspects of loss throughout each piece of literature. There is an existentially significant amount of loss present in Gladiator showcased by the murder of Maximus’ family, destruction of his career, and abduction of his freedom, all set forth by Commodus- a despised emperor. Maximus goes from a revered general in the Roman army with a loving family to welcome him home, to a slave who has seemingly nothing for which to live. However, he somehow finds a will to live through his slavery and plot to take revenge on those who wronged him. “He is forced to fight to stay alive in the Colosseum while awaiting the chance to take his revenge on Commodus, up close and personal” (Mitchell, Web). The loss present in the …show more content…
Frost uses the infinite cycle of changing beauty throughout nature and life with the presence and absence of nature’s gold. With each ending comes a new beginning and “the natural cycle that turns from flower to leaf, from dawn to day, balances each loss by a real gain. Eden's fall is a blessing in the same fashion, an entry into fuller life and greater light” (Ferguson. Web). With the impending end of every good thing in life, a newer, greater outlook is achieved with clarity showing an “awareness of a simultaneous consummation and lamentation” (Kearney Web). The transient fading of all things gold is metaphorically applied to the natural evanescence that occurs in life everyday. “The speaker is determined not to let the passage of time take Spring’s golden green away from him, even as sun sets on the day. He wants to hold on to this hour, to stretch it out as far as he can, even though he knows Time, the enemy, will win out in the end” (Kearney Web).The never ending cycle of transience and rebirth is present throughout Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay, as well as the idea that the greatest moments in life do not last
Both Frost and Caulfield have the desire for beautiful things to last forever. Holden Caulfield recalls a time when he and Jane were younger, they would be playing checkers, and Jane would refuse to move her kings from the back row. It wasn’t any kind of a strategy, nor was it for any particular reason, besides the reason that Jane just happened to like the way they look back there. “She wouldn’t move any of her kings. What she’d do, when she’d get a king, she wouldn’t move it. She’d just leave it in the back row. She’d get them all lined up in the back row. Then she’d never use them. She just liked the way they looked when they were in the back row.” (Salinger, 31-32)Another example is when Holden is watching Phoebe go around and around on the carousel. He sees this moment as a beautiful thing that he wants to preserve. Robert Frost has the same idea when he says “Nature’s first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold”. He’s saying that this first green of nature is so beautiful, but there is no way to hold on to it no matter how much you’d like to.
Ridley Scott’s epic film, Gladiator, considered one of the greatest films in recent years, won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Scott’s film, tells the story of the fall and rise of the great Roman General, Maximus Decimus Meridius. The Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, tells Maximus that he wishes that he ( ) the emperor after his death, instead of his son, Commodus. Angry, Commodus, murders his own father, thus becoming the emperor, and sentences Maximus and his family to death. Maximus escapes, but the Emperor’s men murder his family and burn his home. Slave traders, capture Maximus, and sell him into slavery. Maximus must rise to the top once more, and enact his revenge on Commodus. Through a liberal humanistic critique, the film contains an inherent meaning, shows the enhancement of life and propagation of values, and reveals that human nature never changes.
Adding on to the previous paragraph, Frost in the poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” Frost uses an allusion in “So Eden sank to grief So dawn goes down to day Nothing gold can stay”(lines 6-8). This is an allusion because it refers to the story of Adam and Eve in which both are in paradise but are soon thrown out after giving in to temptation. This helps to convey the
These seemingly negligible birds, symbols of the lyric voice, have intuited the Oven Bird's lesson and are the signs by which one is meant to divine Frost's acceptance of the linguistic implications of the fall from innocence. The Oven Bird, who watching "That other fall we name the fall" come to cover the world with dust, "Knows in singing not to sing." Instead, "The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing." The fall, in necessitating both birth and death, imposes a continuum of identity that compromises naming. The process toward death, begun with birth, transmutes and gradually diminishes form, thus adding to the equation - words are things before they become words and things again when they do - an element of inevitable, perpetual senescence. The birds of "A Winter Eden" say "which buds are leaf and which are bloom," but the names are always premature or too late: gold goes to green, dawn to day, everything rises and falls and is transformed. Thus the Oven Bird says, "Midsummer is to spring as one to ten," because a season - this or any other - may only be codified analogously. "Fall" takes on a series of identities: petal fall, the fall season, the first and fortunate fall, each of which bears, at the moment of articulation, the burden of a whole complex of moral, aesthetic, and literary valuations. This bird is a "midsummer and a midwood bird" that sees things at the moment of capitulation to the imperatives of fall. Loud, he predicts the inevitable, and his "language" reflects the potential meaninglessness of a world in which one is forced to define a thing by what it departs from or approaches rather than what it "is." To...
The poem "Nothing Gold can Stay" deals with a real world problem that can't be solved. Things that are good and make people happy, don't always last very long. Of course everyone can remember when times were good, but change is a natural part of life. Some changes can be nice, but some can also lead to disappointment. It's all normal and happens no matter what. For example, The Outsiders and The Teacher Who Changed my Life both have proof of this occurrence. On one case, Ponyboy didn't have a perfect life to begin with, but things just go worse. For Nicholas Gage, he lived in a harsh environment, and when his wonderful mother tried to make it better, things fell. It always happens.
Frost is far more than the simple agrarian writer some claim him to be. He is deceptively simple at first glance, writing poetry that is easy to understand on an immediate, superficial level. Closer examination of his texts, however, reveal his thoughts on deeply troubling psychological states of living in a modern world. As bombs exploded and bodies piled up in the World Wars, people were forced to consider not only death, but the aspects of human nature that could allow such atrocities to occur. By using natural themes and images to present modernist concerns, Frost creates poetry that both soothes his readers and asks them to consider the true nature of the world and themselves.
In his poem "Nothing Gold can Stay", Robert Frost names youth and its attributes as invaluable. Using nature as an example, Frost relates the earliest green of a newborn plant to gold; its first leaves are equated with flowers. However, to hold something as fleeting as youth in the highest of esteems is to set one's self up for tragedy. The laws of the Universe cast the glories of youth into an unquestionable state of impermanence. It is an inescapable fact that all that is born, pure and clean, will be polluted with age and die. The aging process that Frost describes is meant to be taken literally as well as metaphorically. Literally, the plants that Frost describes are an example of this nonexclusive law of aging. This prooving through common natural phenomenom the tangible and scientific merit of the poem. There is also a spiritual understanding. Frost uses a religious allusion to further enforce the objective of the poem.Whether Frost's argument is proven in a religious or scientific forum, it is nonetheless true. In directly citing these natural occurrences from inanimate, organic things such as plants, he also indirectly addresses the phenomena of aging in humans, in both physical and spiritual respects.
Frost created many poems with a correlation to death. A poem that easily displays this theme is “A Soldier” because it deals with the falling of a soldier at war. As Karen Hardison explains that “"A Soldier" is composed around an extended metaphor that is introduced in the first line: "He is that fallen lance ...." The soldier is compared to a fallen lance, a weapon, that lies on the ground” (1). Most of this poem involves a metaphor and imagery, which help the reader understand the theme. The fallen soldier lies dead on the ground and as time passes he begging to deteriorate yet he remain in the same location, just like the lance. Frost also condemns war and all of the consequences that occur because of it. Furthermore, another of Frost poem that containing the theme of death is “Nothing Gold Can Stay’, the poem indirectly references the theme of death. The poem states that everything eventually comes to an end and that not even gold can remain unchanged. The poem explains this theme with many metaphors about everything’s coming to an end. Freeman explains that “Even the poem's rhymes contribute to this sense of inevitability: Nature's gold we (or She) cannot hold; the flower lasts only an hour; the post flower leaf is like Eden's grief; the coming of day means that dawn's gold cannot stay”(2). The poem explains that everything has a natural cycle and that nothing last forever. When the poem states “nothing can
...ed by many scholars as his best work. It is through his awareness of the merit, the definitive disconnectedness, of nature and man that is most viewable in this poem. Throughout this essay, Frosts messages of innocence, evil, and design by deific intrusion reverberate true to his own personal standpoint of man and nature. It is in this, that Frost expresses the ideology of a benign deity.
Robert Frost’s intricate meanings are stated in such a way that the reader must dwell so much deeper into the poem than one does when one just reads the poem. The poet has a major theme in all of his poems and that theme is nature. Nature is something that Frost could always relate to. In nature Frost sees life, people, and situations in life. In the poem “After Apple-Picking”, he uses the situation of a man picking an apple as another lesson on life. Picking apples is tedious work where one must observe and pick the ripest apples...
par. 1). With clever poetic purpose, Frost‘s poems meld the ebb and flow of nature to convey
The poem is showing how many people are questioning the way Frost conducts himself and his happiness. Everything in Frost’s poem up until the last stanza is dark and depressing. An example of this is, “Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.” (Frost, Lines 7 and 8). Frost is so consumed in the sadness, that its very dark around him. The last stanza is where Frost’s hopefulness is presented. The happiness is hinted towards, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.” (Frost, Lines 13 to 16). He has promised himself to always keep moving forward and focusing on the goodness that life has to offer. Frost knows that he isn’t quite there yet, but he will not give up. He emphasizes his perseverance by reaping himself twice when he says “And miles to go before I sleep,” (Frost, Line 15). He had a break through and knows that he cannot give up. He is taking the little bit of happiness he knows to transform his life completely too where he is happy with every aspect of it. He is taking the hope that he does have and running with it, not looking back at the despair he feels that surrounds
As the speaker, Frost creates himself as a character that everyone can relate to. He is a philosophical farmer, and a hard working man of the earth. He realizes that there is a higher force that does not approve of the walls. Frost, at the same time, initiates the spring mending and works to tear it down by questioning the ritual. He makes the boundaries while trying to break them. It is for these reasons that Frost is symbolic of all of mankind. We go through this ritual daily, choosing who we wall in or out. Humans also create these boundaries on a national level, giving us identification with a certain country or ethnic group and harmfully stressing the differences between us. Like Frost, we question these actions and hopefully attempt to change ourselves for the better. Tearing down these walls is a constant but rewarding struggle.
The vivid imagery, symbolism, metaphors make his poetry elusive, through these elements Frost is able to give nature its dark side. It is these elements that must be analyzed to discover the hidden dark meaning within Roberts Frost’s poems. Lines that seemed simple at first become more complex after the reader analyzes the poem using elements of poetry. For example, in the poem Mending Wall it appears that Robert frost is talking about two man arguing about a wall but at a closer look the reader realizes that the poem is about the things that separate man from man, which can be viewed as destructive. In After Apple Picking, the darkness of nature is present through the man wanting sleep, which is symbolic of death. It might seem that the poem is about apple picking and hard work but it is actually about the nature of death.
Nature is an important theme in every frost poem. Nature usually symbolizes age or other things throughout Frost’s poems. In lines 5-10 it says, “Often you must have seen them loaded with ice a sunny winter morning after a rain. They click upon themselves as the breeze rises, and turn many-colored as the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells.” This demonstrates how nature can sometimes symbolize something. Also in lines 29-33 it says, “ By riding them down over and over again until he took the stiffness out of them, and not one but hung limp, not one was left for him to conquer. He learned all there was to learn about not launching too soon.” In lines 44-48 it says, And life is too much like a pathless wood where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs broken across it, and one eye is weeping from a twig’s having lashed across it open. I’d like to get away from earth for a while.”