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Similarities Between Nothing Gold Can Stay And Mark Twain

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Robert Frost, author of “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, and Mark Twain, author of Two Ways of Seeing A River, explore the idea of beauty by putting their personal feelings into what they see. Both of these American authors use nature to interpret the ways of beauty into words. Frost and Twain go hand in hand with each other in the aspect of their diction. While Frost and Twain both use imagery to demonstrate fleeting beauty, frost includes time indicators, while Twain uses rhetorical questions.
In both “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Robert Frost and Two Ways of Seeing a River by Mark Twain, they both use imagery as a device to describe fleeting beauty. Frost begins with light words to show the idea that there is always a start to something. The word “hue” reflects a positive connotation towards the audience because it represents the goodness. When he uses the word “flower” (line 3), it is associated with the beauty in …show more content…

At the end of his journey with the river, he reflects upon himself the way of the river by making the analogy of the knowledge he gained and a doctor. The “beauty’s cheek” (par.3) is to the doctor as the river is to Twain. He asks himself, “Does he ever see her beauty at all…” (par.3) meaning that as the doctor looks at someone with rosy cheeks, he looks at everything through the knowledge he’s learned as a doctor and does not look at it simply as rosy cheeks. This relates to Twain due to the fact that as he looks at the river, he does not look at it for all of its beauty, but looks at it through the knowledge he has gained about the river. At the very end of the piece, Twain asks the doctor if he “wonders whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?” (par.3) but he is truly asking himself that question about the river. He believes that he has lost most because he now cannot look at the river for its original beauty because it is

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