Nothing Gold Can Stay
Lessons from graduation, the garden, and Robert Frost. WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE
MY NIECE GRADUATED from the University of Rochester a few days ago. We were on hand for the festivities, so we heard the word “Meliora” about a thousand times. It’s Latin for “ever better”—the university’s exhausting and intimidating motto.
Ever Better? Really?
These kids just finished four years of covid-deranged study. Can’t they take a break from relentless self-improvement, and just breathe for a minute?
Nature wasn’t letting them off the hook either, as everything was in bud and flower, growing ever more meliora by the minute. Certain fortunate 22-year olds (like my niece) are indeed irrepressible shoots ready to burst forth into the most productive time of their lives.
But as I looked on on the quadrangle at U of R, the poet Robert Frost was whispering in my ear, as he often does in spring.
My dad was a great memorizer of poems, erupting with them when the circumstances called for pointed versification. Once, when we were driving out west on vacation, and young Peter was complaining ever so gently about the prospect of driving another seven hours toward the Grand Canyon—we’d left Connecticut three days and 2,500 miles earlier, so it wasn’t that unreasonable!—he glanced over his shoulder and corrected me as only he could—with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Psalm of Life:
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Fair point, Dad! Grand Canyon here we come!
Soon I began memorizing scraps of poetry myself. There was room for Robert Frost in my pea brain, because the bard of New England wrote some very short poems, including ones that come in handy, say, when you’re looking out over a football field containing 3,000 college graduates surrounded by blooming magnolias.
This poem, for instance:
Nothing Gold Can Stay
OK, that is a little depressing—especially during this green and golden time of the year, when blossoms and mortarboards are everywhere.
But hey, there are other nice colors aside from gold, right?
Nothing Gold Can Stay
I'm a big poetry fan myself...thanks for the William Blake twist on Robert Frost. Your posts get meliora!
My reaction to R2E this week is similar to each and every week. Pitch perfect perfection is hard to do, to criticize, to copy. But I've got you this time! By capitalizing "WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE" you show a callous disregard for the otherworld loveliness of lower case or italic type styles, just sayin' . . . .