Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Grays, Golds


A friend back in Vermont, poet Sierra Nelson, reminded us today over at The Kenyon Review's blog of how beautiful Robert Frost's Nothing Gold Can Stay is. Seems like the right thing to post to the Drift Record today - out the window as I type, the sky is gray and threatening, the crabapple is almost bare-limbed.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Here's a link to a song performed by Old Crow Medicine Show that picks up on that mix of melancholy and beauty I've been both feeling and seeing all around me lately. It's called We're All In This Together.



2 comments:

  1. Julie,

    Great post! That Frost poem has always been one of my favorites.

    Most of the leaves on the trees here are still green--but there's that autumn nip in the air.

    I feel a kind of glorious melancholy in autumn. It's a bittersweet time of year for me. It's still my favorite season.

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  2. My favorite season, too, Elaine - though I barely took any note of it when I lived in California. In the Bay Area, autumn was almost invisible. Here in the Pacific Northwest, you can't ignore its arrival - brrrrr. And it really is beautiful.

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