Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
....

I know this Robert Frost poem from reading S.E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders as a teenager. It remains possibly the only poem that I can recite in its entirety by heart. For the glass-half-empty crowd, it can be read as a poem of despair; for the whatever-we're-drinking-I'll-raise-a-glass revellers, it is a carpe diem call to appreciate the glory before us. The way Neil Gaiman phrased it, "It always ends. That's what gives it value."