1. My own experience bears out the idea that "nothing gold can stay" is that everything in my life that is precious or good somehow changed, whether it fades away or dies. Gold symbolizes wealth and beauty and I have experienced wealth at one point in my life and it changed dramatically, now I am living pay check to pay check.
2. The lines I felt easiest to understand is "Her hardest hue to hold", "The leaf subsides to leaf", "Her early leaf's a flower". The lines most puzzling for me is "But only so an hour", "So dawn goes down to day".
3. Nature's first green "gold" is the buds on the trees before they start to blossom. The golden hue is hard to "hold" because eventually all the golden colors turn to green with the changing of seasons.
4. Dawn "goes down" to day because the leaf's fall to the ground during the changing of the seasons. The changing of the seasons is what is implied about the relationship between dawn and day.
5. The connection between the dawn day relationship and the green to gold movement is the changing of leaf colors from green to gold.
6. The last line is related to all before it because the color gold with all its beauty does not last forever. It fades away and turns to another color. That nothing can ever stay the same, things do change over time.
7. The reference to "Eden" is referred to nature. The reference to the loss the humankind suffered in the garden of Eden is relevant to the other images in the poem because all life eventually dies at some point and reincarnated into something else beautiful. It is called the circle of life.
8. Gold is so highly valued becaues it is becoming rare and so little of it. Certain human experiences are so highly valued because some of life's experiences will only happen once in a lifetime, so people take a great deal of pride and value in that experience.
You have found lots of meaning in these 8 tiny lines!
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