Brief comment on Frost’s “Design”

“Design”

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning
right,
Like the ingredients of a witches'
broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a
froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper
kite.

What had that flower to do with being

white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to
that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in
the night?
What but design of darkness to
appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.
Robert Frost.

Brief comment

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“Design” is a sonnet written following the Petrarchan model. It is made up of fourteen lines,

an octave and a sestet. The octave raises an argument; evokes an idea; or introduces a

problem. The sestet constitutes a turning point. It builds on the octave by illustrating the idea,

responding to it, meditating upon it or solving the problem it poses. Robert Frost in “Design”

proposes a metaphysical meditation over the order of the cosmos. His poem raises the issue of

the nature of the universe and the nature of God’s relation to the universe.

In the octave, the speaker of the poem reveals an order in a small coincidence in nature which

can be applied to the whole universe whose order is reflected in its minutest details. At the

first few lines of the poem, we see a white and fat spider sitting on a white heal-all flower.

The spider is described as ‘dimpled.’ The use of personification, ‘dimpled spider,’ denotes a

state of happiness, contentment and harmony between the elements of nature. But the scene

turns out to be one of the most ferocious and bleeding scenes. The smiling face seems to be

the face of a victorious predator feasting on its pray, or it is the smile of a vampire which lays

its teeth bare preparing to suck its victim’s blood. The whiteness of the spider is but a fake

masque which hides bloodshed and enmity. The endowment of the spider with human-like

animate feature is contrasted by objectification and making inanimate of the moth. The use of

the simile “like a white rigid piece of satin cloth” shows that the moth lies motionless, as if

enrolled in a shroud and intensifies the tone of gloom and the mood of death. Silk brightness

of the satin cloth entails beauty and innocence, but it also shows a sympathetic tone on the

part of the speaker who dramatizes the death of the moth like that of a fairy princess. The

speaker makes the glow of innocence sparkle out of death to show the cruelty of the scene and

bring it to its highest emotional intensity.

The image of predator-victim chasing denotes death and disorder. The ‘morning’ stands for

life which in order to start properly it has to be tempered by ‘death’ and ‘blight.’ This is the

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course of life where death and chaos loom. The order in the universe shown in the poem is

malicious where survival is for the one who treads on the corpse of his fellow-creature. It is a

state of Hobbsean war of all against all and a Darwinian stance where survival is for the

fittest. The mixture of the ‘characters of death’ invokes the imagery of wickedness. The simile

‘like witches broth’ which contains strange ingredients to carry out a crooked scheme deepens

the idea of a depraved universe.

The deadly is further enhanced by the use of further similes, sound pattern and synecdoche.

The flower which is like ‘froth’ reminds us of the foam of death which is coupled by the

sound ‘th’ denoting the release of the last breath and therefore death. Besides death is further

depicted by the use of the synechdoche “dead wings” in reference to the dead moth. The

movement of the wings which is an indication of the moth’s life and freedom is no longer in

motion. The simile ‘like paper kite’ gives the ‘snow-drop spider’ the right to manipulate its

movement, its destiny.

The sestet encompasses inquisitive lines. Actually the speaker questions the idea of the

whiteness of the flower, the spider and the moth. The whiteness of the flower attracts to its

‘height’ both the spider and the moth. The spider is attracted to the flower as a lurking place

for its hunting of insects. The white moth is attracted to the same white flower in order to hide

from its potential predators. Here Frost brings the technique of masquerade. Both the spider

and the moth resorts to disguise, and they are conducted by a drive for survival. Both insects

resort to camouflage to secure survival. However, the balance of power should work the

hunter and not the hunted. It lures the weak and the helpless to the claws of the mightier.

Thus, the heal-all stands for the seemingly beautiful nature that heals all and gives life, but

when the time is ripe, that same flower is transfigured into a dead-all. The seemingly innocent

and transparent whiteness turns to be the color of death and destruction. The appearance of

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natural beauty is but a masque. Nature becomes a monster in disguise, a wolf in sheep’s

clothing.

Given the previous image, Frost engages into more abstract meditation beyond this grim

situation of the order of beings in the universe. To Frost, it is not a question of what have

those ‘assorted characters of death’ to be or to act. But it is rather a question of who causes

those characters to be or act in a certain given way. Who is responsible for that order? The use

of the conditional shows the speaker’s intellectual endeavor to build a hypothesis that should

be justified logically. Then the use of ‘but’ gives explanation for his assumption and leads to

its validation. Frost suggests that there should be a ‘dark design’ that controls the course of

nature and manipulates the destiny of its dwellers. He does invoke the metaphysical idea of

the divine design of the universe in order to question divinity itself. The metonymic use of

‘design of darkness’ is an indication of divinity. It questions the notion of God’s benevolence

and His relation to the universe He has created. The poem suggests two assumptions. The first

one maintains that if the Creator casts darkness and destruction on the universe just for self

satisfaction, then this implies divine cruelty and therefore contradicts the Christian belief of

divine benevolence. The second assumption assumes that God makes the universe difficult to

live in just to test man’s faith and attribute to him his adequate reward.

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