In 2003 and 2004 I marked the first "real" (to me) day of spring by posting the Robert Frost poem that the early green-gold leaves on the trees always brings to mind.
This year I'm missing the moment--when I arrived in Seattle spring was already well underway, and I received email today from my mother saying that the moment was at hand back in Rochester. Not surprising, really--in both 2003 and 2004 the green-gold moment was on April 21st.
So here's my annual tribute to this moment in time.
Nothing Gold Can StayNature's first green is gold,
--Robert Frost
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.
Very nice. One nice thing about living here at the foot of the Cascades is that you can travel up into the mountains and experience the arrival of spring again and again, as there are still tighly budded bare trees at 3,000 feet or so. Only about 30 minutes from the Redmond campus, too!
Not to over read... it is still very interesting to note how the title and the author's name appear or not within the bounding lines of the quotation box. This year, 2005, there is a sense of completeness with both title and author signature.
To stay ... in the intransitive sense of course means to remain, to stop moving. In the transitive sense if means to hold back, to stop or check. Some years the final words of the poem bring to mind an intransitive, and in other years, a transitive, sense of the verb. So like the gold green of the poem, the very word "stay" itself.