Design

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--

Assorted characters of death and blight

Mixed ready to begin the morning right,

________

Like the ingredients of a witches' broth--

A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,

And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

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?

What but design of darkness to appall?--

If design govern in a thing so small.

Robert Frost 1936

Two couples of images seem pivotal and recurring in Frost’s poem : light/darkness and death/life. Both couples are highly linked. The very interesting point in this poem is the way the poet manages to associate the virginal color with the concept of death. The key to understand Design is in the fact that traditional symbols or roles are reversed. As a consequence, I will focus my analysis on this perverse and strong link between white and death appearing through the extended metaphor of the image of a potion.

The first stanza of the poem takes the form of a magical recipe where the three ingredients are first described, then the process of the concoction and finally the incantation.

First, it is interesting to notice that “white” is the first rhyme at the beginning of the two stanzas and gives the way to seven feminine rhymes including the sound [ait]. It highlights the importance of the word “white”. This word appears then in each of the first three lines of the poem. But white has an uncommon role : it embodies abnormality, it represents death. The ambiguity of the white color is stressed from the beginning by the uncommon association of “a spider, fat” and “white”. The color of immaculate purity is associated to one of the most awful, frightening and cruel animal : the spider. On line two, the choice of the “white heal-all” is not a coincidence : choosing to present a medicinal plant usually blue -- very rare in its white form (and consequently abnormal) -- as the scene of the "moth's" death (a symbol of fragility), is a way to associate clearly white with deviation and with death. Death appears progressively through the successive lines of the poem. The reference on line three to “white rigid satin” made me think about the interior of a coffin, the only place I could imagine with a kind of starched satin.

From line four to six, the reference to death and evil is more direct: “death and blight” or “witches”. The author shows the cocktail, the result of the three white elements combined together : “assorted”, “mixed”, “ingredients of a witches’ broth”. The contradiction between the image of the witch (usually represented in black), preparing a white “broth”, is striking, showing the reversal of the values.

______To finish, lines seven and eight sound like an incantation, making evil emerge from whiteness. The sounds and the associations of words made me think about this idea of magic words : the rhythm and the association of sounds on line seven (snow-drop/spider and flower/froth) and the recurrence on both line of “like”. The ambiguity is here again omnipresent : each ingredient is associated with an element representing lightness, softness and virgin white (spider /snow , flower/froth , paper kite/dead wing) but the result is evil.

_____

______

The personification of the flower, the spider and the moth in the second stanza show that these “characters” did their action on purpose. Frost plays on traditional values, he reverses the traditional symbols, codes and orders to raise the issue of destiny and more generally of God, showing that even the color of God can be synonymous of evil : symbols have no real signification, they are only human inventions, superstitions. Evil, darkness, death appear from purity. There is no real purity as there is, maybe, no complete evil.

To be understood, this poem can be compared with the 17^th and 18^th century Vanitas Paintings : from the beauty and the purity emerge putrid and death, youth becomes oldness, into every apple worms finally bite. Darkness always raises from bright white. There is no absolute purity : the murderer can be as white as the innocent victim ; from the light can emerge abnormality. But what is abnormality ? If abnormality is being white, then it can also be purity. This poem is about relativity of things and humility : things are often more subtle than superstitions and beliefs.