Robert Frost's Design

Robert Frost's Design

Robert Frost's "Design" is a meditation on human attempts to see order in the universe--and human failures at perceiving the order that is actually present in nature. The speaker of the poem perceives what he takes to be a significant coincidence, then speculates on what the coincidence might mean, or whether it means anything at all. However, he fails to see that there is a very good reason for the coincidence he spots, and the "design" of nature that it implies is quite different from anything he suggests.

Design

by Robert Frost

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.

The starting point for the speaker's thinking is what he perceives to be a coincidence: a white spider sits on a white flower holding up a white moth. The coincidence is even more striking because heal-alls are usually blue.

In Western culture, the color white usually symbolizes goodness, purity, and innocence. The language of the poem suggests these connotative links: the spider is "dimpled" as well as "fat and white," like a newborn baby. The moth's wings are like a "white piece of rigid satin cloth," like a bridal dress (or perhaps the lining of a c...

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...er would be attracted to a white flower because it would offer some concealment from prey. There is indeed a "design" at work, but it is not a "design of darkness"; it is simply the order of nature.

The existence of such a design leaves open the question of whether God exists.An atheist would take the explanation above as evidence that there are rational explanations for natural processes, and that there is no need to invoke the concept of God to explain how the universe works. In other writings, Frost does appear to profess belief in God (albeit belief of a complex kind). The focus of "Design," then, is not ultimately the existence or absence of God, but rather the tendency of humans to engage in what John Ruskin called the "pathetic fallacy"--the act of reading oneself into nature. The first act of responsible belief, Frost implies, is seeing nature as it is.