. . . the eight lines of "Nothing Gold Can Stay" are heavily end-stopped. The undesirable result is that the poem will fall apart into eight fragments unless they can somehow be made to cohere both formally and thematically. One major function of the linguistic structures is thus to help organize the poem formally, and, in fact, to organize it in a number of ways simultaneously; this is a second reason for a close examination of its formal structure.

Another brilliant, complex and resonant short poem, "Nothing Cold Can Stay," reconsiders (like several lyrics in A Boy's Will) the perennial theme of mutability. The opening line--"Nature's first green is gold"--is extremely ambiguous. It could mean either that nature's first green in the springtime has now turned to autumnal gold or that nature's first growth is golden, or precious, because it lasts such a short time, cannot hold its color and fades as soon as the leaves fall in autumn.

Frost was eager to show that his excellence extended also to the shortest of figures, as in the perfectly limpid, toneless assertion of "Nothing Gold Can Stay". . . .

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" combines condensed metaphor and vivid description. "Nature's first green is gold" because the pale green leaves of early spring are goldlike in their light-reflecting tints, as well as in their preciousness and promise. It is the "hardest hue to hold" because its appearance soon changes and its ideal beauty flees the mind. The green-gold leaves darken quickly, a change that symbolizes the brevity of all ideal heights. As John R. Doyle points out, the word "subsides" provides the poem's point of balance.

The basic structure here, though extraordinarily compressed, is typically synecdochic. In the first five lines Frost describes the concrete vehicle: the delicate, yellow, flowerlike beginning of a bud, followed by its "subsiding" from that brilliant, unlimited potential to the comparative green dullness, and the inevitable limitations, of the actual leaf.

1934: the date is an approximation, but the poem, "Beaufort Tides," is a depression era poem by John Beecher (1904-1980), who became a poet and a rebel while working twelve-hour shifts at an open hearth steel furnace in Birmingham, Alabama. His fellow workers include both whites and blacks, and he writes poems about their lives and about the historical and economic determination of their suffering from the mid-1920s until the end of his life.

John Beecher’s "Beaufort Tides," takes an astute critical perspective on the history of race relations in the US, especially in the South. The first stanza of the poem sets up a decaying picture of the South. The poem evokes an end to economic prosperity in the same breath that it alludes to the end of slavery. Since the result of "No slavers" conducting commerce is "Rotting hulls / are drawn up on the shore," slavery as a system of racial oppression is articulated to a notion of slavery as the very foundation of the US’s economic power.

His name was suggestive: even so a superficial reading of his poetry proves conclusive: John Beecher was a radical poet, perhaps America's most persistent for 50 years, the heir of an Abolitionist tradition and proponent of the dispossessed seizing power. His most enduring lyrics are about the downtrodden's fight for economic justice, human dignity and political freedom. He heard the music in their voices with uncanny accuracy.

It is ironical but in a sense logical that an authentic "proletarian" poet today--one who writes directly from the experience of the people, from the depths of poor people's lives, and mainly poor black people; a poet who speaks their language, and whose poetry in turn can be understood by these people--should be the descendant of a famous old New England family of dissenters, iconoclasts, atheists and freethinkers (among the clergymen members), ardent abolitionists, native non-conformists.

John Beecher's first poems, like those of Van Doren, appeared in the year 1924, but Beecher's tradition is that of Sandburg, Lindsay, and the Edgar Lee Masters of Spoon River Anthology. Beecher’s verse is, however, not poetry at all.