https://padlet.com/geu10252/at32lxer76xz553v en-us 2021-05-05 12:10:52 UTC 2021-05-09 00:59:46 UTC hello@padlet.com https://padlet.net/icons/png/270d.png geu10252 https://padlet.com/geu10252/at32lxer76xz553v/wish/1493414298 Seasonal change presents itself as a powerful force: a reminder, though beautiful, of inevitability, of nature's sovereignty over our own wills and actions. This sort of change has been the subject of the poetic writings of Robert Frost in Nothing Gold Can Stay, wherein nature's change is used as a lens through which the seeming lack of permanence of all things is explored: "[Nature's] early leaf's a flower; /But only so an hour." Frost asserts that even the most pure and beauteous things (a flower, in this case), shall only remain so for a limited period, eventually falling away through the ongoing march on the world's natural course. Frost concludes, reiterating his premise: "So Eden sank to grief,/ So dawn goes down to day./ Nothing gold can stay." Even Eden, according to Frost, a biblical garden serving as a setting which is wholly pure, seemingly untouchable by any natural force of decay, will fall away with the inevitability of "dawn [going] down to day."

These themes are further explored in poet Karen Volkman's May, wherein the transition of seasons and the coming of a "mouthweathered May" is seen as an almost violent process: it is present on the appearance of an "old saw wind," personified as directing a morbid dance, a "skeletal startle." The poem's audience is mocked, almost, by its touting of the inevitability of May's comings and the advent of change: "What do you think you're grabbing/ with those gray hands? What do you think/ you're hunting, cat-mouth creeling/ in the mouseless dawn?" With May's "pleatpetal purring," Volkman writes, "the rose sighs, Touch me, I am dying." Though unwillingly, change is wrought and embraced.

Both Volkman and Frost share in a feeling of a certain unavoidable persistence of nature. Despite resistance, the continuation of its rhythms continues, present in both Volkman's description of a dark and lavish, almost antagonistic force of the "old saw wind" and Frost's remarking on "dawn [going] down to day." These forces, inescapable as they may be, are simply, as both argue, a painful but natural process of ongoing change.



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