Design

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 coffin; already the speaker seems to be looking for the "darker" underside of the color white). The name "heal-all," too, suggests health, or perhaps the wisdom and benificence of a healer.

By the end of the octet, the contrast between the positive connotations of the color white and the apparent gruesomeness of the scene before the speaker is made explicit. On the one hand, the scene is one of "death and blight," mixed like a "witch's broth" and including "dead wings." On the other hand, the spider is like a "snow-drop," suggesting purity, and the moth's wings are like a "paper kite," suggesting innocence.

In the sestet, the speaker wonders how this coincidence of a white spider and white moth on a white flower came to be, especially given the ironic tension between the positive connotations of the color symbolism and the negative connotations of the spider's killing of the moth. The speaker seems to absolve any of the three of any blame, however: the heal-all is "innocent," and so, apparently is the spider, who is "kindred" to the flower. The innocence of the moth hardly needs to be established.

In the closing couplet, the speaker offers two answers to the question of how the coincidence of the three white creatures came to be.The first possibility is that there is a force of evil at work that has created a "design of darkness to appall"--Satan, perhaps, delighting in the blasphemy of clothing a scene of destruction in the color of innocence and purity. The second is that there is no order in the universe at all, or at least none that operates on such a minute level: the "design of darkness" could exist only if "design govern in a thing so small." Since God is thought to govern everything, no matter how small, the possibility that design doesn't govern in small things immediately raises the possibility that there is no God to order the big things--such as human lives--either.

The speaker, then, has articulated the problem