The Loss of the Golden Age @ elimae

Honey in the oak became the golden bough. Grapes hung like rubies, corn was like gold. The gold flower was gold. But while the mineral transformation of nature "improved" it with gold status, this imagination never transferred to people. They never got any better. Donne asks, "But who ere saw, though nature can work so, / That pearl, or gold, or corn in man did grow?" (To the Countess of Bedford, 65-66). Flowers might be made of gold, which the handy Midas myth explained in part, but people did not look gold, even if they were made of it. The architecture of the golden age as a universal myth is at best decoration and diversion. here