Her hardest hue to hold.

Nothing Gold Can Stay … or a therapist’s reflections on grief

If you are around my age (30!) and you attended public school in the southern or midwest United States, there’s a good chance that The Outsiders was a part of your middle school reading curriculum.

The novel by S.E. Hinton tells the story of a group of Oklahoma teenage boys navigating the sacrifices and obstacles inherent to entering adulthood.

There’s an oft-quoted line from the novel, you may have heard it before:

“Stay gold, Ponyboy.”

One of the boys encourages the youngest of the gang, affectionately nicknamed Ponyboy, to hold on to his youthful spirit and lack of cynicism.

He found the words for this desire from the Robert Frost poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” ... And from the poem’s title alone, I’m sure you can understand the tragic irony of this request.

Nothing Gold Can Stay
by Robert Frost

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.

As a kid I had to memorize this poem. And though I don’t remember too many details of the novel itself, the poem has stuck with me. It made a home in my…