The poem as a whole, of course, encodes many of the tensions between popular and elite poetry. For example, it appears in an anthology of children's writing alongside Amy Lowell's "Crescent Moon," Joyce Kilmer's "Trees," and Edward Lear's "Owl and the Pussy-Cat." Pritchard situates it among a number of poems that "have ...

The idea that the "inner" materials of the artist are "re-formed" by the "outer" materials in which he works helps us understand the implications of the reading of "Stop- ping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" given by Frost himself in "The Constant Symbol." Much commentary on "Stopping by Woods" has suggested that the poem expresses a complicated desire for self-annihilation.

Poets have the whole phonetic structures of their languages to work with when they compose. Some poetic devices such as meter and rhyme are so well represented in the general vocabulary as to need little comment, but subtler effects that poets presumably put into their work, and that readers or listeners get "by feel," may benefit from a closer, and perhaps more specialized, analysis. Two examples that show particularly well how a poet slows the reader down at the appropriate spots, especially one reading aloud, are cited below.

The sense of homelessness in "Acquainted With the Night" [Frost’s quintessential dramatic lyric of homelessness] becomes acute when the speaker is granted his wish and the full burden of loneliness descends upon him. When the interrupted cry breaks over the roofs from another street, he stops his feet, but it is a cry that concerns him not at all--no one calls him home.

"In a Disused Graveyard" follows three poems that glance with various degrees of wistfulness at disappointed ideals that end in uncertainty or death. Here the speaker gently mocks people's unwillingness to die and gives stones the ability to see and say that death has ceased. The scene, however, is concrete: a New England graveyard no longer used because its community has faded. But visitors still come to read the tombstones, not out of affectionate attachment but out of curiosity. The attraction of these living by the dead emphasizes the contrast between vitality and arrest.

Perhaps no single poem more fully embodies the ambiguous balance between paradisiac good and the paradoxically more fruitful human good than "Nothing Gold Can Stay," a poem in which the metaphors of Eden and the Fall cohere with the idea of felix culpa. Six versions of the poem exist, the first sent to George R.

. . . 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.