Literary notes about golden (AI summary)
Throughout literature, the word golden is employed to evoke images of brilliance, sanctity, and a nostalgic ideal. Its use can suggest the radiant beauty of a sunlit scene, as when golden light floods a royal setting ([1]) or bathes the landscape in a soft afterlight ([2]). It is also an emblem of an exalted, almost mythical era, with references to the fabled golden age ([3], [4]) and divine objects like a golden key that unlocks secret worlds ([5]). Moreover, golden descriptors extend to figures of power and beauty—a golden queen or a character sanctified by gold ([6]), while the term can also carry ironic undertones when it marks the loss or mismanagement of something precious, such as the killing of a golden goose ([7]). In these various contexts, golden functions as a versatile metaphor, simultaneously suggesting splendor, divine favor, and the weight of treasured ideals.
- Queen Eleanor sat in her royal bower, through the open casements of which poured the sweet yellow sunshine in great floods of golden light.
— from The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle - It was a very calm evening with a dim, golden afterlight irradiating the glen.
— from Rilla of Ingleside by L. M. Montgomery - It is a marriage such as they made in the golden age, when the men were all wise and majestic and the women all lovely and loving.
— from Adam Bede by George Eliot - Hence that age was named the Golden Age.
— from The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson by Sæmundur fróði - When, however, she had sat there for a while, a white dove came flying to her with a little golden key in its mouth.
— from Household Tales by Brothers Grimm by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm - The new golden queen, resolved to show herself valiant and worthy of her advancement to the crown, achieved great feats of arms.
— from Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais - They did not understand that they had killed their golden goose.
— from The Moors in Spain by Stanley Lane-Poole
