End of Innocence: Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Rio Brown, age 13

Rio in the garden, age 6, picking the Forbidden Fruit

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.

Innocence is an object of purity.  When life begins the human is pure and completely innocent. This can also be seen in some religions and governments, but as time goes on the item becomes corrupt.  I believe that Robert Frost is telling of this innocence that exists at first, but is almost impossible to stay for all of its existence.

The beginning of the poem, "Nothing Gold Can Stay" says "Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold."  I find this to be saying that at the beginning of almost everything there is a purity.  That purity is the gold and it is an object, a trait that is the hardest thing to keep and it is "Her hardest hue to hold."  Corruption eventually reaches it and changes it to something no longer pure.

Secondly, Robert Frost keeps telling of this innocence and corruption that occurs over and over in different ways.  One of the ways that is most obvious is the reference to the Garden of Eden.  A perfect place in which Adam and Eve were placed to live.  At first Adam and Eve were perfect and incorrupt.  It was at this time that the serpent tempted Eve to partake of the forbidden fruit and of this item Adam and Eve did partake.  They were banished for disobeying a command and becoming corrupt.  "Then leaf subsides to leaf /  So Eden sank to grief, / So dawn goes down to day / Nothing gold can stay".

Levels of innocence can be possibly good and bad.  In the beginning of the American Government it was an almost pure thing and a very effective government.  As time went by more laws and changes in laws took place.  We are now drifting away from that one document that holds us together as an innocent government, the Constitution.  As we drift away from the Constitution, the government becomes corrupt and loses it's purity.  "Nothing gold can stay."

Robert Frost was one of the people that noticed the corruption that exists in our life and that we start out so pure and innocent but as we go through our life we lose that innocence and become corrupt and lose the "gold" that we have "Then leaf subsides to leaf."