"Nothing Gold Can Stay" Robert Frost

Robert Frosts poems are mostly about nature, and this one is not different.  This one specifically is about spring and the new, green things that nature creates.  It also describes the eventually of the destruction of the good that nature creates.  In the sixth line, Frost alludes to Eden, the paradise made for our enjoyment until we brought evil into it.  Frost must think that nature is good by its own design and would stay that way if not for the destructive potential of mankind.  We tarnish the gold that nature creates.  Because of us, "nothing gold can stay."  Frost also implies that good things dwindle over time and that flowers only have a short time to live.

"Terrence, this is stupid stuff" by A.E. Housman

The first stanza tells the story of a man who has killed his friends and anything else that listens to his poetry.  The second stanza begins with the description of several different types of alcohol and finishes with the description of a drunk night complete with waking up in an unknown location and not knowing what happened.  The third stanza is about a salesman trying to sell liquor to some people. The poem concludes with the story of a King where people try to poison him but end up poisoning themselves for some reason that I am not sure of.  The King was Mithridate who had built up an immunity to poisons throughout his lifetime by taking less lethal doses of several poisons.  Alcohol is definitely a common theme throughout these seemingly unrelated tales.  The speaker seems to think that alcohol is something positive because he never speaks of the evil that is associated with alcohol.  In the second stanza, he says that "malt does more than Milton can" which implies that alcohol can make men do great things.

"The Golf Links" by Sarah N. Cleghorn

Cleghorn was born in Virginia in 1876.  She graduated from a northeastern college which I'm sure was a great accomplishment for a lady of the time.  She was also friends with Robert Frost and Dorothy Fisher, a famous novelist of the time.  Her poems were mostly comments on society.  They ranged from women's suffrage to prison reform to the death penalty to child labor.  This poem in particular is about kids that are working while the adults are playing.  Shouldn't that be the other way around?  Cleghorn is probably making a commentary on the child labor of the early 1900s.  There were no child labor laws at that time, and children were used to work in dangerous factories like steel mills.  The children worked hard every day while the adults played golf and then drank their troubles away.  In this time period, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.