Robert Frost's "Design"

In Robert Frost’s poem Design, the image of white is used repetitively. The word itself appears five times in this fourteen lined sonnet and the color is implied twice more through the description of the “snow-drop” spider and the flower comparable to “froth.” The significant images highlighted in white are the spider, the moth, and the flower. The other substantial, yet contradictory, image in this poem is that of death.

Frost uses opposing images in his Petrarchan sonnet Design to prepare the reader for contemplation of an ethical question. Design begins with the vivid description of a “dimpled,” “fat,” “white” spider. The words chosen here are intended to evoke the images of a baby and of innocence. In the next line Frost describes that the spider is located on a “white heal-all.” A heal-all is a flower, normally blue in color, fabled to possess the ability to cure any disease. Atop the heal-all is a white moth, rigid in death. This scene is an anomaly in nature, the unusually white flower failing to heal the moth and the innocent white spider preying on the dead white creature. In the second quatrain, Frost uses adjectives with a happy quality to contrast dark reality. The “snow-drop” spider, the light and airy “froth” of a flower, and the wings “like a paper kite.” The reality is of a spider weaving an unseen net of destruction, a flower aberrantly changed, and a moth rigidly dead.

In the sestet Frost begins asking questions about this event. In lines 9 and 10 the poet questions the aberration in the flower. Why is the heal-all white instead of blue? In lines 11 and 12 he ponders what led the spider and moth to it. In line 13 he asks if a design were revealed in this event, is it only a design of darkness to “appall” or horrify us? In the final line he reflects on the poem in its entirety and society itself by writing “If design govern in a thing so small.” If design exists in events as minor as the one so eloquently described in Frost’s poem, then it also must impact the lives of humans. However, if this event was just a coincidence, then there is no greater design dictating the course of human life and what occurs is merely happenstance.