Until quite recently I had somehow overlooked this delicate short lyric in my well-worn copy of Robert Frost’s ‘Collected Poems’; it has since become one of my favourites. I guess we all have our gold – the vigour of our youth, first love, the infancy of our children – and indeed it does not stay.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

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