Gold *can* stay, but not in this world

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.

Robert Frost

I first encountered Robert Frost's beautiful and so-memorable miniature some forty-plus years ago, and at this time of the year; via SE Hinton's The Outsiders novel, and then through reading RF's selected poems - in what now seems like a dark and despairing era of my life. 

On that cusp of early, working, adulthood - as the enchanted state of childhood and early adolescence receded fast and very fully under pressure of day and night study and work as a doctor in a psychiatric hospital; the truth that "Nothing gold can stay" was evident and inescapable. 

Inescapable in terms of my fundamental assumptions concerning life. 

So much so, that the only optimistic future was one in which I simply did not think about this truth; in which I was so immersed in the business of living that "living" consumed all of my attention.  

As a means to this end, I sought a "niche" of pleasant living, of relative ease and comfort and stimulus... And this was (always implicitly and sometimes explicitly) my aim from then onward and for a decade, and somewhat more. 

This poem is an indelible insight into the fundamental tragedy of this world, which is death - or, more generally, what I nowadays conceptualize as entropy - a tragedy even more fundamental and all-pervading than evil. 

The fact that there is a new spring, and new "gold", each year is good; but (as Tolkien's longaevus elves knew) it also repeats and amplifies the tragedy. 

In this-world, creation does not, and cannot, solve the deep sadness of entropy: that nothing gold can stay. 

Our real and solid and sufficient hope, the only real hope, the only answer; is the Second Creation of Heaven, on the other side of death, for those who choose to follow Jesus there. Thus the tragedy remains but subsumed in a "Comedy" - a happy ending.