Nature’s first green is gold
-- Speaker (Line 1)

Importance: This is the opening line of the poem. It introduces the poem’s primary setting, nature, as well as its primary symbol, gold. Its focus on “green” versus “gold” also establishes the poem’s throughline of tension between initial phases and the phases that succeed them.

But only so an hour
-- Speaker (Line 4)

Importance: This line continues the description of the “flower” in the previous line, here emphasizing that flower’s transience (3). Line four provides the poem’s only solid time-marker (“an hour”), stressing more than any other line the small temporal frame that “gold” occupies.

Then leaf subsides to leaf
-- Speaker (Line 5)

Importance: Here, the speaker repeats the word “leaf,” referring to line three (“Her early leaf’s a flower”) but emphasizing the ordinariness that follows the “early leaf.” The line is interesting for the first leaf's ambiguity, feasibly referring to both a general natural phase (like the “early...