Design of Darkness

Images found in "Design By Robert Frost: dimpled, white and fat spider, white heal-all, rigid satin cloth, death/blight, ingredients of a witches' broth, snow-drop spider, paper kite, dead wings. 

Robert Frost’s poem “Design” follows the standard Petrarchan sonnet form. In the first eight lines, Frost seems to be telling a story about a spider while playing with the contrast between white and black. The first three lines of the poem, “I found a dimpled spider, fat and white/ On a white heal-all…/ Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth,” Frost emphasizes the color white. The color of the spider becomes relevant because when one thinks of spiders, the color white rarely comes to mind. We know of spiders to be mostly a dark color, such as black or brown. He then mentions that the white spider is on a white heal-all. The type of flower that Frost chose the spider to be on also becomes important to the contrast between white and black. The flower’s name, heal-all, creates a feeling of healing and life but more importantly it is rare that such a flower to be white in nature. After the image of the flower, Frost compares the moth to a “white piece rigid satin cloth,” which again seems not to fit with the general view of a moth.

In lines 8-12, the images change from being described as white and started to take a form of darkness. Words like “death,” “blight” and” witches’ broth” start to reveal the true characteristics of the spider mentioned in the first line. Also, Frost emphasizes in line 6, that the spider like the “ingredients of a witches’ broth” were ready to start the day “right.” In order to continue the contrast between white and black, Frost used the word “right” to make the reader think of “white.”  The volta in line 9, changes the direction of the poem from a story to an answer in the form of rhetorical questions. In lines 9-1, “What had that flower to do with being white, /The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?/ What brought the kindred spider to that height,/ Then steered the white moth thither in the night?” Frost questions the reason why the spider ate the moth. The rhetorical questions allow the reader to realize that they were all brought together by the designer.

All of the emphasized images found in the poem serve as the foundation or even an example of Frost’s argument about the designer or God. The argument that Frost proposes is that there is a god who created everything beautiful in this world to prove that there must exist a higher power. But even though the world is a beautiful place, it is also filled with much disappointment and darkness. The spider, heal-all and the moth are beautiful by themselves because they are the designs of the designer. But in the last two lines of the poem, Frost expresses the horror of the “design of darkness.” Even though the spider has a beautiful white design, the darkness of the design leads it to kill the moth. The constant contrast between white and dark images in the poem, allowed Foster to show the contrasting sides in the design and helped him make his argument more vivid.