The Poem That Lost Two-Thirds of Itself

A Poetry Tale about Robert Frost, told by Hello Doggo.

Nothing Gold Can Stay is eight lines long. It’s one of the shortest famous poems in English. And, according to a recent Poetry Foundation essay, it started out three times the size.

As that essay tells it, in March nineteen twenty, Robert Frost tucked a draft into a letter to his friend, the critic George Roy Elliott. It was called Nothing Golden Stays, and it ran to three stanzas. Twenty-four lines.

The first stanza is recognisably the poem we know. Nature’s first green is gold. Then Frost kept going, for two stanzas more.

By the time it appeared in The Yale Review, in October nineteen twenty-three, those two stanzas had gone. What was left was eight lines in which everything slips away almost before you’ve noticed. Her early leaf’s a flower, but only so an hour. So Eden sank to grief. So dawn goes down to day.

Now, the gorgeous bit. By the same account, Frost didn’t bin the cuttings. Years later, he recycled those two lost stanzas into a quite different poem, called It Is Almost the Year Two Thousand. Nothing gold can stay, apparently. But nothing useful gets thrown away, either.

And the eight lines that survived went further than he could ever have guessed. In nineteen sixty-seven, a young novelist, S. E. Hinton, had a boy recite the poem in The Outsiders. Later his dying friend tells him: Stay gold, Ponyboy.

Which is lovely. And exactly what the poem says can’t be done.