Fleeting Beauty in Verse: Aging, Time, and Nature's Transience

William Shakespeare's Sonnet 5 and Robert Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay both describe how beauty and youth change over time. Through the use of end rhyme, rhyme scheme, and assonance, both poets reveal that beauty and youth do not last forever. Firstly let's take a look at the use of end rhyme in the poem by William Shakespeare titled Sonnet 5. In the first three lines, it reads, “Those hours, that with gentle work did frame/will play the tyrants to the very same”.

End rhyme is used to portray the idea that beauty is associated with youth, and that aging will destroy good looks. Throughout the rest of the poem, it details the consequences of time, and that beauty will eventually have to disappear as Shakespeare wrote, “To hideous winter, confound him there/Beauty o-er snowed and bareness everywhere”.

Line 6 has personification at the beginning and indicates a dramatic effect on the consequences that will happen to the young and beautiful as time passes by.

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The poem also strongly emphasizes the idea of preserving beauty by using a metaphor about having children as seen toward the end of the poem where it reads, “But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet”. This shows that beauty can be protected but only the scent of it stays not the physical aspect. Shakespeare is saying throughout the whole poem beauty can be preserved but only through creating and even then only the scent of beauty will stay not the physical aspect, beauty will disappear overtime due to aging because aging destroys good looks and since beauty is associated with youth as you age it will disappear.

Next in the poem by Robert Frost titled Nothing Gold Can Stay he also includes end rhyme in his poem as well as alliteration to talk about the impermanence in life, the beauty of nature and the effect time has on it, this includes the idea of how everything will fade away overtime. In the first line of of Frost’s poem it says that the first green that comes out during spring is equal to gold as reads, “Nature’s first green is gold,” (Frost 1). Even though it portrays the first green to sprout it also introduces the idea that all the seasons melt into one another and will never last a lifetime, eventually they have to let the next season take its place. Also included in the poem is personification and alliteration as seen in the next few lines, “Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower,” . The alliteration is used to portray that spring can not last forever, it is impossible to keep a plant green forever