At just eight lines long, Nothing Gold Can Stay, is a complicated piece that jumps from the physical to the spiritual, all to tell the reader that perfection is short lived. Throughout Frost's poem, Nature is capitalized, and therefore personified, becoming symbols with human-like qualities. Frost also uses ambiguous lines, such as "Nature's first green is gold" (1). Along with his use of symbols, and ambiguity, Frost uses paradoxical lines, like "Her early leaf's a flower'' (3) and ' 'then leaf subsides to leaf'' (5) to reinforce his point of out of the ordinary preciousness being a quality that won't last. The tone is sad, yet reflective, as it informs the reader of how something remains prized but for a certain time frame. Robert Frost transitions from the natural world, to the spiritual world, using ambiguity, paradox, symbols and tone to assert his notion of the inevitable expiration of something precious. .
In the first four stanzas, Frost sets up the reader to picture nature as a woman, capitalizing Nature, and using the pronoun Her. The first two lines state that: "Nature's first green is gold/ Her hardest hue to hold" (1-2). Immediately, the reader could think of spring, with the sun rising and giving the trees and leaves the appearance of being gold. The lines also suggest how, during the day, the sun starts to set, giving Mother Nature the transition back to her normal green color. With the use of alliteration in line two, Frost is able to show the reader the actual difficulties of maintaining such a bright color. By using successive h sounds, the reader has no choice but to slow down due to the difficulty syntactically. Frost uses this tactic, and the word choice to give the reader both a visual and internal feeling and understanding of just how difficult it is for Nature to hold onto its essence. While the eyes are reading, the readers begin to feel themselves slow down, in order to read the line in its entirety.