Burning gold: for John Robert Ross

Style, Spring-Summer, 2006 by Donald C. Freeman

The bud's first externality, the flower, seems to be the golden bud's natural product, a leaf, but in a tiny fraction of the bud's life, the flower "subsides" to the bud's longer-lasting product, a leaf. The duration of an "hour" expresses, I think, an appropriate fraction of the "day" in the deeply implied THE GROWING SEASON IS A DAY metaphor that operates in the poem. As the poem barely implies (in "early leaf"), high summer's green leaf will ultimately turn a similarly deceptive color (sometimes but not always golden) and fall still further to the ground at the end of the growing season. Eden, the world's Golden Age, subsides like the gold of early buds and the false leaf of the flower; dawn, like Eden and the first natural stirrings of spring, a time of pure potentiality, necessarily declines to the quotidian, like the first buds, the first flowers, and prelapsarian innocence.

The direction of the poem's transformative alchemy is, of course, in reverse. What seems to be gold is, over time, shown to lack gold's permanence; and the deceptively golden color of the buds in the poem's first line is undone by the strong anaphora of its second quatrain: [Then/So] [leaf/Eden/dawn] [verb of declining] to [fallen state]. The paradigmatically equivalent leaf-cum-flower, Eden, and dawn necessarily decline to states that have in common the fact that their duration is much longer than their deceptive initial appearance (for the green leaf, the season; for postlapsarian Eden, all human life; for day, all the hours but those of dawn). Even the poem's rhymes contribute to this sense of inevitability: Nature's gold we (or She) cannot hold; the flower lasts only an hour; the post-flower leaf is like Eden's grief; the coming of day means that dawn's gold cannot stay. The final collapse of the vain effort expressed in line 2 to hold the hue of gold occurs in line 2's metrical twin, "So dawn goes down to day." The only permanence in postlapsarian Nature is change and its promise of natural rebirth.

Haj would call Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay" a hologram, I think: a poem in which each of the smallest subparts means the same as the whole. But that is an argument to be made another day. For now, I will say that these arguments are what John Robert Ross taught us all how to make, by his example--even if many of us make them less elegantly than he would. And, also by his example, John Robert Ross taught us what it means to stay the course in the search for truth, even in the most difficult of circumstances. In a year during which Haj and I both have become Medicare beneficiaries--and in the year before our Two-Thirds of a Century Party--I can think of no better words in which to celebrate our three-and-a-half decades as friends, colleagues, and fellow wayfarers down the "road less traveled by" than the concluding lines, slightly customized, of Frost's "The Tuft of Flowers":

   [I] fe[lt] a spirit kindred to my own;
   So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

   But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
   And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

   And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
   With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

   "Men work together," I told him from the heart,
   "Whether they work together or apart."