Design by Robert Frost

DESIGN

          -Robert Frost

                   Robert Frost is one sneaky fella. At first glance, "Design" seems like a simple little poem. It even has a nice singsong-y meter and rhyme.    

                   The poem begins with a simple setup—the first three lines introduce us to the main characters. We have a big white spider on a white flower, poised to eat a white moth. The speaker sees this bizarre little albino meeting as some weird witches' brew, as all three are brought together for some awful reason.

                   That observation leads the speaker to a series of questions: Why is this flower white, when it is usually blue? What brought the spider to that particular flower? What made the moth decide to flutter by right then?

                   Frost concludes that if it were "design" that brought these three together, it must be some pretty dark design. In other words, it's not a comforting thought to think that God went out of his way just to make sure this moth got eaten. But that's the crucial "if" of the last line: if design does govern these small things. (What if—gulp—there's no design at all, and everything in life is just totally random occurrences?) The reader is left with just as many questions as Frost. This short poem takes a simple little thought and pushes us all the way to questioning the very nature of creation and life as we know it.

                    "Design" isn't a ghost story. Really nothing all that awful happens. A spider gets ready to eat a moth. It's the circle of life—get over it. But the philosophical argument that Frost develops begins to play with some of our deepest fears. Frost moves from telling a story to asking questions, questions that become increasingly more urgent. It is as if he is slowly uncovering all the possible implications of the scene and he is terrified of what he discovers. And we're quaking in our loafer’s right along with him. In "Design" there's a lot of supernatural stuff going on. We've got the big guns of the supernatural world: God and the cosmic forces that control our lives. But we also have the small potatoes of the other-worldly realm—witches, overweight spiders, and pale flowers. The whole poem is about big things and small things and whether those big and small things are controlled by superstition, by God, or (hang on to your hockey-sacks) even by nothing at all.