Nothing Gold Can Stay Analysis Essay

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Perfection is too pure for our flawed world and that is precisely the reason why perfection is not allowed to live in the temporal world for too long. In fact, anything beautiful is running on a timer. Beauty may not be aware of this aspect but it will inevitably happen. There is paradisiac good which is perfect and then there is human good which cannot be perfect because every human is flawed. Humans can be good to a certain extent and only for a short period of time. If humans were allowed to be good in the paradisiac sense then it is all anyone would want to attain and it would be the equivalent of the original sin which occurred in Eden. In “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, for example, Robert Frost speaks about nature’s first green as being gold (Line 1). This is a symbol that the earliest stages of nature’s blossoming is beautiful. The gold is not the element it is the emotion that the beauty of nature exudes. Frost follows this line saying that this green is nature's hardest hue to hold (Line 2). This line symbolizes and concludes that the beauty that was present in nature fades quickly. The entire poem is a never ending way of saying that the …show more content…

That is the basis of This Ruined House: A Meditation on Beauty. “Beauty and brokenness live an intimate relationship, so close that they actually are, in Zen terms, “not two” (Kornblatt 59). In order to have beauty it must be broken. Kornblatt argues that is the very fact that we have imperfections that makes human beings so beautiful. “It was the tumbling together of so many shards that yielded a momentary design, which only fell again to become yet another independent mosaic” (Kornblatt 66). This quote is precisely what “Nothing Gold Can Stay” emphasizes. The beauty from the kaleidoscope only was there momentarily and then went away. That one form of beauty from the kaleidoscope was gone but it was able to create a new mosaic and that was beautiful