Design

by Robert Frost

Poem

Genres: Poetry

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1922

About the author

Flinty, moody, plainspoken and deep, Robert Frost was one of America's most popular 20th-century poets. Frost was farming in Derry, New Hampshire when, at the age of 38, he sold the farm, uprooted his family and moved to England, where he devoted himself to his poetry. His first two books of verse, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), were immediate successes. In 1915 he returned to the United States and continued to write while living in New Hampshire and then Vermont. His pastoral images of apple trees and stone fences -- along with his solitary, man-of-few-words poetic voice -- helped define the modern image of rural New England. Frost's poems include "Mending Wall" ("Good fences make good neighbors"), "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" ("Whose woods these are I think I know"), and perhaps his most famous work, "The Road Not Taken" ("Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- / I took the one less traveled by"). Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times: in 1924, 1931, 1937 and 1943. He also served as "Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress" from 1958-59; that position was renamed as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry (or simply Poet Laureate) in 1986.

Frost recited his poem "The Gift Outright" at the 1961 inauguration of John F. Kennedy... Frost attended both Dartmouth College and Harvard, but did not graduate from either school... Frost preferred traditional rhyme and meter in poetry; his famous dismissal of free verse was, "I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down."

Reviews

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

The heal-all is a widespread plant found in the countryside. It is normally at all times blue in colour and is supposed to have remedial and curative properties. Some varieties of it also have white flowers.

One day, the poet comes across such a plant. The poet inspects and corresponds to the reader that he saw a white spider on the white heal-all. The poet illustrates the spider very affectionately and compassionately using words like ‘dimpled’, ‘fat’ etc.—words that we use for charming, small children. While we're on the subject, the spider has in its mouth a white moth which he holds like ‘a piece of rigid satin in cloth”. These three brought together in this manner complete a model of white.

This sets the poet thinking and he reflects and broods upon this.

He asks himself and the reader if the coming together of the while heal-all, the white spider and the while moth is an absolute accident, a stroke of chance or is it well-planned, design or devise of some controller of the universe.

Very rationally, the poet senses a designer, a prime-mover behind this prototype of whiteness: there without doubt is a guide who sets the mold and guides the route of movement.

Though the pattern is white, it is an integration of an assortment of ingredients of ‘death and blight’. The contrast of these components to those of a witches’ broth is only too appropriate. The ingredients in witches’ broth are simple, common and as innocent as a lamb.

But when mixed together in a meticulous manner by the witches, they assume unusual, overwhelming and depraved qualities. The poet travels further on the string of logic and surmises that the contriver of a diabolic world must also be devilish and diabolic.

The poet comes to the conclusion that there is some terrible and malevolent power responsible for the propulsion of things in the manner as they happen; a power that weaves appalling and fearful ‘designs of darkness’.

Here, perhaps Frost’s tone is that of Blake who is at once awed and scared by the ‘fearful symmetry’ of the Tiger.

But this is not the end. And it is the ending that is important. The last line is suggestive of another possibility and gives to the poem an open ending. It suggests that there might not be such an awful design after all, and the coming together of the white flower, the white spider and the white moth might be a pure accident.

But the implications of these suggestions are far more petrifying than those of the earlier finale. It presupposes a disordered world where anarchism reigns. There might be no design in it because man’s universe is too insignificant and immaterial to grant any scope for design or planning.

In such a world, everything could be attributed to chance and accident, totally empty of any planning.

In large things, microscopic phenomena of some real significance, the classical, mechanics of design probably does operate, but these little things, things of no real importance, microscopic phenomena, like flower or moth or man or planet or solar system, are governed by purely statistical laws of quantum mechanics, of random distribution --in other words, by probability and mistake.

Design is one of the best known of Frost’s sonnets. It shows Frost’s poetic qualities compressed in one small poem. Unlike many of his other sonnets in which contemplative excellence reigns unchecked, the present one, along with On a Bird Singing in its Sleep is a fable in miniature.

[Max Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Yaya Maison · Rating 2 out of 5]

Could not understand this.

[Razvan Banciu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of the time Mr. Frost was a man of few words and that made his works more valuable.

This two-stanzas poem, published for the first time in 1922, is about the complexity of the world. Of course, there are lots and lots of possible explanations, but he goes for a supernatural creator, The God, as being the author of this miracle. That looks to be the conclusion, yet the first lines are the ones I like most:

"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"

[Dara Potvin]

Read this for my first year university English literature class in 2008.