"Design" by Robert Frost (Deconstruction Analysis)

Design

by Robert Frost

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.

--- 1922

           "Design' is a poem of finding evil in innocence, a song of experience, though the voice is hardly that of Blake's child-like singer. On a small scale the first line, like the whole poem, builds up a joke in tone, rhythm, and image that grows into a 'joke' of another sort. In the poem, the joking discovery develops gradually through a series of contradictory pictures. 'A white heal-all' suggests purity and safety, though the color echoes the white of the swollen spider. In another side of the three lines, the speaker gives away his joke. First there is the very correct iambic on the line four in exactly ten syllables, every other one of which must be stressed.

           Assorted characters of death and blight...

           This statement takes on a cheerful sing-song quality, an effect increased in the next line by reversing the stress and omitting the short in 'Mixed ready'. The adding of unstressed syllables lightens the next line to soften the ugliness of what is being said:

Like the ingredients of a witches broth...

         

           How about design of darkness to appall?. Alliteration picks out salient impressions to give older theological and reverse twist- 'Design, yes- but for evil. The 'if' stands out oddly because of the reversal of stress and because of the pause for the loss of a syllable. In the poem first thirteen lines, Frost simply extends the logic of the traditional argument from design. Frost invokes just that tradition in the eleventh and twelfth lines of "Design".

           The implication for Frost, I think, is that the "design of darkness" or of nature or of God is the design made by the perceiver or by the poet. Only the human eye can make or find any design in the natural world. Though the narrator's role in the drama is intentionally and ironically minimized, it remains crucial in the two opening of the words of the poem: "I found". Like all revelation, all design "has been ours". The last line of "Design" suggests, for a temperament as willfull and feisty as Frost.