Robert Frost and My Eighth Graders

Every autumn I'm reminded of a poem that my eighth graders loved - "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost. This poem won Frost a Pulitzer Prize, one of the four Pulitzers he received for poetry in his lifetime.

Nature's first green is gold.

Her hardest hue to hold. 

Her early leaf's a flower,

 But only for an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf,

So Eden sank to grief.

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

The poem's theme is rather depressing, really. New leaves and new flowers symbolize hope, freshness, and innocence. New life is lush and vibrant, filled with the excitement of hopeful beginnings - as beautiful as gold. But the sad thing is - the gold only lasts "for an hour." Then, the leaves subside to decay and death just as the newness and hope of perfect Eden subsided to sin and death. As even the  joy of dawn subsides to day and eventual night. Surely, Frost says, gold is the hardest hue to hold for nothing gold can stay.

It certainly wasn't the joy of the poem that attracted my junior high kids!

It was the context in which they read the poem that resonated with them.

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton was required reading for eighth graders, and "Nothing Gold Can Stay" is a gem buried amid conflict between teen gangs in the novel. The story's main character, fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis, loses his parents in an automobile accident. Parented now by his twenty and sixteen-year-old brothers, Ponyboy and his brothers belong to the Greasers, a gang on the poor side of town. Always feeling like an outsider, Ponyboy struggles with right and wrong in a society that makes no sense to him. Life disintegrates for Ponyboy as he faces death and the murder of friends . . . life's gold was gone.

Ponyboy had heard Frost's poem in his English class. He repeats the poem to his sad, abused buddy Johnny. Eventually, Johnny is fatally injured in a church fire while saving some children. As Johnny lay dying, he whispers to Ponyboy, "Stay gold."

 Gold . . . the symbol of all that is good, right, beautiful, untarnished, and pure. "Keep that gold in your life," the dying Johnny says to Ponyboy. "Don't give up. Strive for the best."

"Nothing gold can stay?" Good news, Mr. Frost. There is the possibility of gold in this life and forever. When life doesn't make sense, when our culture and society seem to be disintegrating around us, when relationships crumble, there is still hope, there is still life, there is still the promise of newness ... for eternity because ... there is God, and with God all things are possible.

When all seems confused and lost, take heart, seek God, and find the gold that will never tarnish or decay.

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