An Unfolding of Robert Frost's "Design"

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"I always wanted to be very observing," Robert Frost once said, after reading his poem "Design" to an audience. Then he added, "But I have always been afraid of my own observations". What could Frost have observed that could scare him? Let's observe the poem in question and see what we discover.

Starting with the title, "Design", any reader of this poem will find it full of meaning. As "Webster's new world dictionary" defines "Design", the word can denote among other things, a plan, or "purpose; intention; aim". Some arguments for the existence of god (I remember from Sunday school) are based on the "argument from design"; that because the world shows a systematic order, there must be a designer who made it. But the word design can also mean "a secret or sinister scheme" - such as we attribute to a "designing person". As we shall see, Frost's poem incorporates all of these meanings. His poem raises the old philosophic question of whether there is a designer, and evil designer, or no designer at all. Frost probably read William James on this question, as a critic has shown convincingly.

Like many other sonnets, "Design" is divided into two parts. The first eight lines draw a picture centering on the spider, which at first seems almost jolly. It is dimpled and fat like a baby, or Santa Claus. It stands on a wild flower whose name, heal-all, seems ironic: a heal-all is supposed to cure any disease, but it certainly has no power to restore life to the dead moth. In this second line we discover, too, that the spider has hold of another creature. Right away we might feel sorry for the moth, were it not the simile applied to it in line three: "like a white piece of rigid satin cloth." suddenly the moth becomes not a creature but a piece of fabric - and yet satin has connotation of beauty. Satin is luxurious material used in rich formal clothing, such as coronation grows and brides' dresses.

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About the Poem "Design" From Robert Frost

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In the fifth line of the poem "Design", an invisible hand enters. The characters are "mixed" like ingredients in an evil potion. Some force doing the mixing is behind the scene. The characters in themselves are innocent enough, but when brought together, their whiteness and look of rigor mortise are overwhelming. There is something diabolical in the spider's feast.

The "morning right" echoes the word rite, a ritual - in this case apparently a black mass or a Withces' Sabbath. The simile in line seven is more ambiguous and harder to describe. Froth is white, foamy, and delicate - something found on a brook in the woods or on a beach after a wave recedes. However, in the natural world, froth also can be ugly: the foam on a polluted stream or a rabid dog's mouth. The dualism in nature - its beauty and its horror - is there in that one simile.

So far, the poem has portrayed a small, frozen scene, with the dimpled killer holding its victim as innocently as a boy holds a kite. Already, Frost has hinted that nature may be, as Radcliffe squires suggests, "nothing but an ash- white plain without love or faith or hope, where ignorant appetites cross by chance". Now, in the last six lines of the sonnet, frost comes out and directly states his theme.

What else could bring these deathly pale, stiff things together "but design of darkness to appall?" the question is clearly rhetorical; we are meant to answer, "Yes, there does seem an evil design at work here!" I take the next-to-last line to mean, "What except a design so dark and sinister that we're appalled by it?" "Appall", by the way, is the second pun in the poem: it sounds like a pall or shroud. Steered carries the suggestion of a steering-wheel or rudder that some pilot had to control. Like the word brought, it implies that some invisible force charted the paths of spider, heal-all, and moth, so that they arrived together.

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