The Meaning Of Change In Robert Frost's Nothing Gold Can Stay

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In Frost’s poem Nothing Gold Can Stay, he describes the changing of nature and possibly referring to a person event in his own life. Through paradox, imagery, and synecdoche, he supports a message that his life is changing to beauty. Overall, the mood of the poem is joyous and peaceful. To show Frost’s message, he uses several paradoxes in his poem. One of which is the first line of the poem, “Nature’s first green is gold”. This portrays his message in a way that somewhat makes the reader think. He connects the colors green and gold so that the audience can infer that the “first green” is beautiful and delightful to the eye. The reader can understand this because gold is typically used as a color of royalty or importance. There are many ways one can turn something ordinary into some extraordinary. A common way to do so is to change the color of it to gold, which is exactly what Frost did to get his message across. Line three in Frost’s poem …show more content…

This may sound a bit confusing, but once it is broken down, its quite simple. Frost uses synecdoche in line five when he says “Then leaf subsides to leaf” Earlier in the poem, Frost says that the leaves are like flowers, meaning they are not a normal leaf. Therefor his meaning behind “then leaf subsides to leaf” is that the extraordinary and beautiful leaves that he described in the beginning of the poem, are now subsiding, or transforming back to the ordinary leaf. He also uses synecdoche when he says line eight, “Nothing gold can stay”. Again earlier in the poem he compares the greens of nature to gold, “Nature’s first green is gold”. Therefore, when he says “Nothing gold cans stay” he is saying that the gold and the beauty that he once saw the green as being, returns to being ordinary. The synecdoche used helps the writer show the change of the beauty towards the end of the