Guide to The Outsiders

What Does Stay Gold Mean in The Outsiders?

Two words, one poem and the reason the whole book exists

By Tori BooksUpdated November 20265 min readContains spoilers

S. E. Hinton

Ask anyone who read The Outsiders at school what they remember, and two words usually come back first. They are whispered in a hospital room by a boy who knows he is not going to make it, and they send the narrator off to write the book you are holding.

The phrase did not start with Hinton, and it means more than it first seems to.

What is the Frost poem in The Outsiders?

Nothing Gold Can Stay is an eight-line poem by Robert Frost, published in 1923. It notices that the first green of spring is really gold, and that this early color lasts only a moment before the leaf turns ordinary green. From there it widens out: every first, perfect thing, dawn included, fades into the everyday. Its last line gives the novel its phrase.

Ponyboy recites it from memory when he and Johnny are hiding out and watch the sun rise over the hills. He says he never quite understood what Frost meant. Johnny, surprisingly, is moved.

When does Johnny say stay gold?

Near the end, after the rumble, Ponyboy and Dally rush to the hospital where Johnny is lying badly injured from the fire. Johnny tells Ponyboy, with almost his last breath, to stay gold. Ponyboy does not understand it yet. It is only later that he finds out what Johnny was trying to say.

What does Johnny's letter say?

Johnny leaves Ponyboy his copy of Gone with the Wind, the book they read together in hiding. Inside, Ponyboy finds a letter. In it Johnny explains that he has been thinking about the poem: he believes Frost meant that you are gold when you are a kid, when everything is new, like the dawn. He asks Ponyboy to stay that way, says that saving the children was worth it, and asks him to tell Dally to look at a sunset.

That letter is the turning point of Ponyboy's grief. It is the reason he starts writing his English assignment, which becomes the book itself.

What does gold stand for?

Gold is innocence, but not in a soft or naive way. It is the ability to notice beauty, to feel things, to see people as people. Ponyboy watches sunsets. Johnny wants to rescue strangers. Cherry and Ponyboy agree that the sunset looks the same from both sides of town. All of that is gold.

The tough boys of the gang have mostly lost it, and Dally has lost it completely. The novel asks whether a boy who has seen what Ponyboy has seen can still keep it. Johnny's answer is yes, if he chooses to.

Is Johnny right about the poem?

Not exactly, and that is what makes it beautiful. Frost is saying that golden things cannot stay, full stop. Johnny turns the poem into a request: stay anyway. Readers and teachers often point out this reversal. Johnny knows time will change Ponyboy, but he hopes the part that notices sunsets can survive it.

Who sings Stay Gold in The Outsiders movie?

Stevie Wonder. He wrote the lyrics and sang Stay Gold for Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 film, and the music was composed by Coppola's father, Carmine Coppola, who also scored several of his son's other films. The song plays over the end credits and has become as linked to the story as the poem itself.

Stay gold in the book, the film and the musical

More about The Outsiders

Books Like The Outsiders

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This guide discusses the whole plot, including the ending.