My name is Jemima Stratton and I am a first-year English student at Exeter University, with a particular interest in creative writing. Eden’s Gold is a poem that I wrote about youthful ignorance in a world before one grows up and realises that the world isn’t quite as perfect and golden as it once seemed.  It was very much inspired by both Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Robert Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay which both convey the idea that while one might spend youthful days in a kind of summer paradise, which I have used as both ‘Eden’ and ‘Arcadia’, this paradise never lasts and so it must be savoured, because all good things must come to an end. The idea of letting go of one’s youth and therefore, letting go of the blissful days in the Eden of your own making is a difficult and frightening one, but coming of age is never easy and the only way we can go on to experience more in life is to rise from the ashes of our childhood and face what is ahead of us.

The first green of summer:
the birth of youthful languor.
In a haze of juvenility, we could bask
underneath a tree tinged with golden hues,
quietly humming the dawn chorus.

We could live the invincible summer
for freedom is a gift of chance.
Echoes of Pan’s pipes reverberating
through lush meadows in
the innocence of Arcadia.

Our theme was folly.
We rose and fell with the incandescent light,
Ignorant to the withering beauty.
We lazed as if the sun would never set,
and hoped as if there was anything left.

Eden’s promise, broken by grief for the days
where we lay and merely wondered.
Twilight sank to a mellow dusk as we lay
in the ashes, afraid.

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