Nothing Gold Can Stay: Motifs

Feminine Nature

An important motif in the poem is the trope of nature as feminine. The speaker makes this link between nature and femininity explicit in the opening lines, where at two points they refer to “Nature” using the pronoun “her” (lines 1–4):

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.

Here, the speaker seems to associate the generative characteristic of the natural world with femininity. Just as women are linked to childbearing and the gestation of new life, the natural world seasonally “gives birth” to new life, producing buds that later burst into flowers. The second half of the poem maintains this implicit link between the natural world and the feminine, but here the speaker reframes that link in a troubling way. They do so by alluding to the way “Eden sank to grief” (line 6). Many accounts of the biblical story of paradise lost emphasize that Eve was the first to defy God’s command not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. According to this framing, Eve holds more responsibility than Adam for their exile from Eden and for the burden of original sin. In this way, the speaker seems to suggest that, if nature is female, then its generativity also contains the seeds of its own decline.

Leaf

Over the course of a three-line span (lines 3–5), the speaker repeats the word “leaf” three times:

Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.

The repetition of “leaf” in these lines helps emphasize the speaker’s use of imagery drawn from the natural world. More significantly, however, the speaker emphasizes the leaf in a way that draws attention less to the leaves themselves and more to their transient existence. The first line quoted above illustrates this transience in an abstract way. When the speaker says that Nature’s “early leaf” is “a flower,” they aren’t referring to a leaf at all. That is, the leaf is just a figurative stand-in that immediately gets replaced by the image of a flower. The third line illustrates this principle more concretely, in the image of one leaf replacing another. The use of the verb “subside” is crucial. Although it refers to the continual regeneration of leaves, the verb has strong connotations of lapse and decline. Subsiding involves a downward trajectory, which conjures a melancholy image of leaves falling away forever. The notion of “leaf subsid[ing] to leaf” helps the speaker reflect on the link between change and loss. Leaves don’t stay; leaves leave.