An Analysis of Robert Frost’s “Design”
My analysis of Robert Frost’s “Design” begins with the title itself. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, “design” can denote among other things a plan or “purpose; intention; aim.” But “design” can also mean “a secret or sinister scheme” – such as we might attribute to a “designing person.” Frost’s poem incorporates all of these meanings. His poem raises the question of whether there is a benevolent or malevolent Designer in the world, or whether in fact there is any Designer at all.
“Design” is a sonnet, and like many other sonnets, it is divided into two parts. The first eight lines draw a picture centering on a spider, which at first appears almost innocently jolly. The speaker describes it as “dimpled” and “fat,” words that might remind us of a baby. It is also described as “white,” a colour sometimes associated with purity and/or innocence. At the same time, though, the spider holds another creature, a moth, while standing on a wild flower whose name, “heal-all,” seems ironic in this context. A heal-all is supposed to cure any disease, yet here it has no power to restore life to the presumably dead moth. (Later in the poem, we learn that the heal-all used to be blue; perhaps it too has died and turned bleached white.) The description of the moth in line three is worth noting: “Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth.” Suddenly, the moth is transformed from a creature into a piece of lifeless fabric, “rigid” here reminding us of the physical rigidity – rigor mortis – brought on by death. It’s useful to note also how the word “white” has taken on different connotations, from the innocence and purity of the first line, to the lifelessness associated with the whiteness of the heal-all, to the rigidity of the white cloth associated with the moth. Yet “satin” also has connotations of beauty and luxury, so we are left with a set of contradictory associations after the first three lines.
In the fourth and fifth lines, we see that these “characters of death and blight,” as the speaker now describes the spider, the flower, and the moth, are “mixed” together as if they were ingredients in a “witches’ broth.” We might speculate, then, that some invisible force or agent is doing the mixing behind the scene. The spider, flower, and moth are innocent enough in themselves, but when brought together and concocted in this way, they begin to take on other connotations of violence and death. In this context, the phrase “morning right” might echo “mourning rite,” a ritual associated with death. The simile in line seven (“a flower like a froth”) is more ambiguous. Froth can be white, foamy, and delicate – something found in a running brook or a beach after a wave recedes. But froth can also be ugly: the foam on a dying dog’s mouth, for example. What we are presented with here is the ambiguity of nature – both its beauty and its horror.
So far, the poem has portrayed a small, frozen scene, with the spider holding its victim as innocently as a boy might hold a “paper kite.” Now, in the last six lines of the sonnet, the speaker asks what could bring these elements (spider, flower, moth) together in this particular way? What driving force has caused the blue flower to die and turn white? Who has “brought” the spider to this place at this moment? Who has “steered” the moth to its death? Words like “brought” and “steered” suggest that someone or something has planned this, has meant for this to happen. And the speaker concludes that there has to be behind all this the “design of darkness to appall.” In other words, some greater Designing force has intended and caused this to happen.
Yet immediately after this suggestion that the universe is in the hands of some sinister designer, in the last line the speaker introduces a note of doubt. Perhaps “design” does not bother with “a thing so small” at all. It may be that the spider, the flower, and the moth are all too insignificant for any designing force to bother with or even notice. Instead, they are left to their own devices; there is no orderly explanation for what happens. And we might then extrapolate from this that we, as human beings, are also relatively insignificant creatures in the universe. Human violence, suffering, and death may not have any orderly explanation, either. The poem leaves us with the suspicion that all things (including suffering and death) happen simply arbitrarily – and for some of us, that may be the most frightening thing of all.