Nothing Gold Can Stay

"Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost (1924)

“Fire and Ice” is another short poem—nine lines—from New Hampshire and like “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” highlights Frost’s use of natural elements (fire, ice) to convey a discussion regarding human emotion (desire, hate).

"Acquainted with the Night" by Robert Frost (1928)

“Acquainted with the Night” was published in The Virginia Quarterly in 1928 and appeared later in his collection West-Running Brook. It uses imagistic observation to grapple with mortality and the passage of time. Its form is more complex—14 lines of terza rima, an interlocking rhyme—but its melancholy tone is similar to that of “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

"Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" by William Wordsworth (1807)

This long poem was written by William Wordsworth, the English Romantic poet, in 1804. Frost admired Wordsworth’s poetry about nature and its mutability but takes a bleaker view of the passage of time than Wordsworth does in this poem. Both poems discuss the stages of man and losing the innocence of childhood, but while Wordsworth feels that this loss aligns humans with others in solidarity and hope, Frost is more succinct and more despairing.