Connecting to The Outsiders Through a Poem

The other day a friend and I were having a morning meeting in east sunlight and I commented on the light yellow green leaves just unfurling on the trees outside the window. She replied, "Nature's first green is gold."

To which I replied, "Her hardest hue to hold."

And then we recited the rest of the poem, sometimes taking turns on every other line:

Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Which, of course, is Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay."

This friend and I are almost exactly the same age, and I asked, "Do you know that poem from S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders or just because you know the poem?" And it turned out she had never read The Outsiders, which was published when we were about 12 years old. She just loved the poem and memorized it.

But she picked up the book yesterday and read it, and I've been thinking about what that would be like as an adult vs. rereading it as an adult, having loved it as a young teen. I know I didn't see it the same way the last time I reread it a decade or so ago, but I did still like it (unlike, say, A Separate Peace, ugh). It was path-breaking in the young adult genre when it came out. I'm almost afraid to talk to her about what she thought of it.

But I will.


Some of the book's covers: The first edition, the 1970s paperback I bought as a teenager, and two that seem to be student designs. (Google image search reveals it's a popular book to use in design class assignments.) Most of the other real paperback covers are boring movie tie-ins.