Nothing Gold Can Stay

Study Guide

Literary Devices

Rhyme

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Literary Devices Rhyme

“Nothing Gold Can Stay” is organized into a series of four rhyming couplets, which gives the poem the following overall rhyme scheme: AABBCCDD. All the rhymes in the poem are strict and exact, and they all fall on the last stressed syllable of each line. Most of the rhymes also fall on monosyllabic words like “gold” and “hold” (lines 1 and 2) or “leaf” and “grief” (lines 5 and 6), which makes them examples of so-called masculine rhyme. However, one exception to this rule appears in the poem’s second couplet (lines 3–4):

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

This rhyme is different than the others due to the pairing of a disyllabic word, flower, with a monosyllabic word, hour. That said, the status of “hour” is slightly ambiguous, since the double vowel sound of the “ou” may be stretched out to sound like two syllables. Even so, “flower” and “hour” arguably form a feminine rhyme, which involves a rhyme between stressed syllables that are then followed by one or more unstressed syllables. Frost’s use of polysyllabic feminine rhyme here is quietly ironic, since it’s the rhyme pair that most explicitly references the limited nature of time: the flower only lasts an hour.