Poetry Analysis Robert Frost

POETRY ANALYSIS: DESIGN

Robert Frost's poem Design seemingly disputes the question whether there is a design to life; yet, he is not able to establish an answer. Despite the comlexity of his poem his implied message is rather simple. Frost's statement clarified human's eagerness to finding a meaning to life and an essential background and reason to events, regardless of how small and insignificant they might be. His work states an advice not to interpret too much into insignificant conincidences or apportion them too much relevance.

During the first stanza, the speaker of the poem encounters a dimpled white spider on a white heal-all that has previously caught a white moth. This seemingly coincidental situation is so distinct because heal-all's are usually blue. This captures the readers attention, assuming they have fundamental botanical knowledge. Also, the conflict of the attributes that are usually associated with the color white, such as purity and innocence and the actual event of a spider killing a moth seems contradictory and ironic. He utilizes contradictions throughout the first stanza to convey the uneasy atmosphere. The beginning of the poem certainly is not the epitome of a “morning [begun] right.“ This description of a somewhat creepy atmosphere is supported by the unusual literal devices Frost uses in the last three lines of the octet. The simile “Like the ingredients of a witche's broth...“ explains the later, unconventional comparison of the moth's dead wings to a “paper kite.“

In the second stanza, the sestet, the poet reflects upon the irony of the situation and wonders how this coincident (a white spider with a white moth on an unusually white flower) could have occured. Searching for an explanation for the contradiction between the color symbolism and the bad denotation of the spider's deed, he resolves the conflict by blaming no one involved in the situation and he declares all of them innocent in order to reach concordance with meaning of the white color. The heal-all is innocent and the spider is “kindred“ to the flower. Obviously, the moth would be considered innocent, as well. Furthermore, he proposes two answers on how the conincidence might have happenend. He suggests that a “design of darkness,“ an evil power, delectated by conceiling a bad deed in the color of goodness, is to be held responsible. Yet, a spider killing an insect is a fairly common sight and in no way spectacular. This would imply, that the designer, God, or whatever you might want to call it, himself, besides all the beauty on earth, also created