Robert Frost Design Essay

In Robert Frost’s poem “Design”, the way in which the world works is questioned

through the acts of a small, uninteresting, and seemingly natural occurrence. It sets the

scene in almost the same way as a play, with characters, a setting, and a deep underlying

thought that grabs the reader or viewer and asks for more attention. It asks whether there

really is a meaning to life as we know it, or if everything that happens does so emptily

without any meaning at all. The poem asserts specific attention on the matter of

coincidence and irony in our world, and how that can be related with the possibility of an

almighty super being possessing total control on the way our world interacts as a whole.

Within the first few lines

Frost describes the spider, moth and

heal-all to be of a white color. This is quite strange and coincidental because a spider is

usually black and a heal-all is usually blue. The chances of all three of these things

appearing together at once is highly unlikely in almost any circumstance. There is also

clear evidence of irony in “On a white heal-all, holding up a moth” (Frost, R. Design. 2).

Here the heal-all, which is known to be blue but for some odd reason is white, is being

completely contradicting to its name as it is actually the killing grounds of the moth.

At first glance, “Design” may seem like a simplistic poem with clear comparisons to

that of a nursery rhyme. Delve further, and up rises a slew of dark questions that cannot

simply be answered with ease. It reaches into the heart and begs for an answer of the true

meaning of life, whether there is a purpose for everything or all is meaningless. It is

clearly seen when the author asks “What brought the kindred spider to that height, / then

4

steered the white moth thither in the night?”(11-12). Frost asks the question of whether it

is just a coincidence that the spider and moth were both there on that fateful night, or

The “witches broth” (6) that

comes next gives the sense of a deathly concoction being created, and brings to mind a

5

bubbling, slimy green goop in a huge black cauldron. This theme of changing tones

return in the very next line, “A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth” (7). Once again,

we are given thoughts of happiness and cheerfulness, like images straight from a

children’s book. As the poem continues to “and dead wings carried like a paper kite” (8),

it instantly returns back to its true, grim nature. The key word of this line would be the

word “carried” (8), which signifies that the moth is without a doubt dead, and it is far

from being like a paper kite.

The rhyming scheme can also be tied into the overall concept of coincidence and irony

in the world. For the first stanza of the poem, rhyming was in the format ABBAABBA,

and for most poems that will generally change going into the second stanza. At the start

of line 2 though, the ‘A’ line repeats itself. Frost does this to signify his stranglehold in

the way in which the poem is written, showing the godlike power he has over the creation

of the poem’s design. His control of the poem in the light of rhyming is