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Analysis Of The Poem Nothing Gold Can Stay

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The poem, ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’, by Robert Frost is an important part of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. Explain how the poem relates to the key events in the novel.

The Outsiders, a coming-of-age novel written by S.E.Hinton, tells the story of the loss of innocence due to violence and grief through fourteen year old Ponyboy Curtis’ eyes. Robert Frost’s 1923 poem, Nothing Gold Can Stay, is referred to in the novel. The author deliberately includes the poem to reject the idea of Nothing Gold Can Stay; show how growing up can force us to get rid of our innocence; and to show the connection between the boys losing their ‘paradise’ and the poem.

The concept of Nothing Gold Can Stay is consistently dismissed as untrue throughout the novel. …show more content…

His paradise would include his Mom and Dad brought back to life. However, Ponyboy’s reality is that his parents are dead, his living members are broken and he is labelled as a ‘greaser’. Ponyboy is required to fend for himself, or else he would never survive. Johnny had never experienced paradise before the gang came along. ‘His father was always beating him up, and his mother ignored him’ (page 14). Without getting sheltered, he had to face the dangers of the world alone. Frost alludes to Adam and Eve from Genesis in the line ‘so Eden sank to grief’. The Garden of Eden was Adam and Eve’s shelter. When they were banished from the Garden of Eden, they lost their shelter, and had to cope without it. In The Outsiders, without the ‘paradise’ of their parents, Johnny and the Curtis brothers are forced to survive on their own, just as Adam and Eve had.

Dally’s death was a key event in The Outsiders. He is the literal embodiment of the Nothing Gold Can Stay poem. When he was born, he didn’t know pain and instead was ‘gold’. As he grew up, he had to survive by himself, due to his father not giving ‘a hang whether [he is] in jail or drunk in the gutter’ (page 107). He was arrested at the age of ten and was ‘hardened in jail’ (page 110). His survival came at the cost of his ‘gold’. Consequently, this dangerous life led to his ‘violent and young’ (page 187) death. Dally personifies the poem, being the ‘nature’ in the poem. ‘Nature’s first green is gold’ shows

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