Poem Analysis: A Frostbitten Order

Bailey Jehl

4/12/2015

John

20th Century Poetry

A Frostbitten Order

Once upon a time, I encountered Robert Frost’s “Design.” I generally despise romanticized depictions of nature, and Frost nearly lost me at “dimpled spider.” But I kept reading, and I quickly found this spider not to be a coloring-book critter, but a devil like creature, toying with the remains of a moth as if it were child’s play. In fact, what lurked behind this seeming meditation on divine still life was a malevolent, godless order, or lack thereof. For the first time, the idea that traditional poetic devices could be used nontraditionally, as opposed to creating new devices, was brought to the surface. And of course, “Design” was but the tip of the iceberg. One might

It is so powerful that the speaker’s mending of the wall becomes “just another kind of out-door game”. He is, of course, fully aware of his uncompromising quarrel with the stones: he “could say ‘Elves’” cause the rocks to tumble, “but it’s not elves exactly” (36-37). The association of the forces of nature with something absurdly spontaneous exposes humanity’s attempts to give natural phenomena meaning: rather than admitting the “crass casualty,” as Thomas Hardy words it, behind everything, one dreams up a cause, a “god of the gaps,” for a given occurrence. However, the speaker’s neighbor does not seem to realize the farcical element to this game: “He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbours’” (27). From this, the fence seems to personify manufactured meaning: for the neighbor, it is maintenance of place and identity. However, that this is the sole thing he says throughout the poem, and twice, equates this Jeffersonian ideal to a worn-out proverb, similar to “four legs good, two legs bad.” Frost critic Robert Faggen similarly observes the neighbor as “a primitive clinging to his relics,” albeit relics that have lost their meaning (xxxiii). And the ending reinforces the archaic nature of this proverb, stating, “He will not go behind his father’s saying / And he likes having thought of it so well” (43-44). Implicitly, his father would not have gone behind his father’s father’s saying, and his father’s father’s father’s saying, and so on, like a house of cards, destined to collapse in the face of this fence, which, out in the countryside where “there are no cows,” appears to serve no practical purpose (31). Consequently, structure stands exposed as merely a rebellion against the disorder in nature. Nevertheless, be it a house of cards or a stone wall, gravity always