In the Outsiders, Ponyboy is a character who lives in a crime-riddled neighborhood, has little to no money, and his parents are dead. His best friend, Johnny, accidentally kills a rich kid, called a soc, and they have to run away from their homes. When Pony runs away, and he tells Johnny about a poem he read, “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” Neither of them really understood what it meant at the time. But later in the book, Johnny writes Ponyboy a letter about the meaning of this poem. The poem is literally about nature, but its figurative meaning is that everyone starts out with gold, but slowly loses it, then becomes cold and mean, like the criminals in Pony’s neighborhood. …show more content…
The garden can only have gold and perfect things in it, but there is no gold left, so it’s empty. The figurative meaning is that when a character in the Outsiders left a golden, comforting, or perfect place, like Eden in the literal meaning, they lose some/all of their gold. In the story, Pony moves away from these golden places multiple times. The first is when his parents die and him and his brothers go into poverty, the second is when Johnny killed a soc and they both had to hide in an abandoned church, and the third and final is when Johnny and Dally dies. This is also when the has the least gold, when Pony is the farthest away from Eden.
The sixth line is “As dawn goes down to day.” The literal meaning of this line is pretty simple, the sun is rising, then setting, and time is passing. The figurative meaning of this line is that as time goes on the bad things in life keep happening to people, and they have to give up more and more gold over time. In the Outsiders, enough time passes that when Pony and Johnny are hiding in the church, Pony realizes that things are bad, and his gold is wearing away, he recites the poem, “Nothing Gold Can