My freshman year of college I was taking the standard writing class part two. I had to pick a poem and analyze the meaning of it. I don't like much poetry, except haiku and bawdy limericks. I picked Robert Frost's Nothing Gold Can Stay. If only because I remember it from the Outsiders. I compared it to Bruce Springsteen's song Glory Days. My teacher, who went on to be the poet lauriet of Rhode Island read the essay, the only thing he wrote on my paper was "A Are you from New Jersey". This morning as I heard Glory Days I wish I still had that paper. Anyway here is the poem:

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.