Design by Robert Frost: Summary

Design by Robert Frost: Summary

One of the most difficult poems, Design, an Italian sonnet by Robert Frost was published in 'A Further Range' in 1936. The sonnet is the expression of the poet's surprise over the mysterious existence of the world surrounded by omens and evil designs. According to a critic, ‘this is a poem of finding evil in innocence, a song of experience, though the voice is hardly that of Blake's childlike singer.'

The poet has drawn the picture of a fat and white dimpled spider which had caught hold of a moth like the white piece of the cloth on a flower called white heal-all. This simile has been used to indicate the white color of the moth. All these three things – spider, heal-all flower, and the moth are shown to be white. All these three white creatures and flowers are brought together for some terrible reason. The terrible reason is a dark design of death or we can say the food chain in a positive term.

By bringing all these white things together, the speaker is trying to highlight the food chain lying in nature. The moth has gone there in search of the juice of heal-all flower and the spider has gone there in search of the moth. One day, even the spider will become the food for the flower. All these things of the universe are interconnected. Nature has designed us to be interdependent. Even living things and surviving upon each other. Nature has already designed this interconnection.

The "heal-all" is a common country plant supposed to have healing properties: it is almost always blue in color. The poet has found a strange white variety and stranger still, attained to it a white spinner, "a snow-drop spider", holding a white moth, completing a pattern of whiteness. Here, in the world of chaos and darkness, there is purpose and design, "if (the poet speculates whimsically) design governs in a thing so small."

The white color is generally a symbol of purity and innocence, but in this poem, this color has been contrasted with its meaning. The white color of the wicked flower heal-all (an ironic name) and the white natural born killer spider bring forth the image of an actual horror scene and the innocence of the white color does not matter here. So, in this respect, the white color in this poem has been used as a symbol of decay, death, and destruction. It is the design of the god to bring them together and it is also the dark design of nature to turn blue color heal-all flower into white, black color spider into white and the moth into white. These three characters of death and disease are at the same place like the ingredients of witch’s broth. This image does not bring the idea of life enhancing, but the image of destruction, cruelty, and dependency. By showing everything white so cruel and horrific, Frost infers that darkness is everywhere, even under the hide of so called innocent people. Humanity is vulnerable as the moth in the poem.