Observation and Illumination: Comprehending Design Through the Petals of a "White Heal-All"
Robert Frost's "Design" ponders the structure of the natural world. Written as a Petrarchan sonnet, the poem suggests a particular, set design. However, the design of the poem's lines are not directly mirrored by its content. Instead, Frost sets strict structure against incongruous content. Observation and illumination function as the two modes from which the poem's meaning is derived. Moving from a description of the food chain process, a phenomenon regular in nature, to a more abstract discussion concerning the revelations that this predator/prey process reveals about God's omnipotence, the observed contrasts with illuminating elements to reveal the disturbing reality of God's role in the natural world.
The poem begins with a concrete observation. In the first octave of the sonnet, Frost describes a white spider that has caught a moth. The spider sits atop a flower, the "heal-all," holding its prey. The color, white, is the predominant image in the first stanza. In fact, the descriptions of each of the poem's characters involve white. A member of the species of spider termed, "snow-drop," is described as "fat and white" (1). The Oxford English Dictionary defines the "heal-all" presented in the poem's second line as a flower that may
be "applied to recent cuts of a slight nature." Later in the stanza, the speaker compares the restorative plant to "froth" (7). The victim moth is comparable to "a white piece of rigid satin cloth" and its wings resemble "a paper kite" (3, 8). Based upon the basic conceptual metaphor that good is white, the speaker's surface observation sets up a glaring white scene of innocence.
The actual structure of the stanza seems to mirror the natural function it describes. The stanza consists of the first octave of a Petrarchan sonnet. While the rhyme scheme maintains the
conventional abba pattern throughout the first eight lines, the meter is regular iambic pentameter. The very routine structure seems to set the scene for what appears to be a very normal as well as necessary aspect of nature.
However, the octave's white glare and rigid structure blind the observer for a moment. The speaker is at first so wrapped up in observing the natural world that he or she fails to notice the situation's multiple oddities. What appears to be a precise plan on the surface, both in form and content, consists of underlying deviations. The first clues suggesting that the octave strays from the description of an ordinary natural plan involve word choice. The speaker chooses descriptive words and phrases that suggest that some sort of murder or evil is taking place. For example, the participants taking part in the predator / prey process of the food
chain are depicted as "assorted characters of death and blight" (4). The line suggests that both the flower and the spider are
accomplices in the moth's death. The word, blight, is of particular interest in the line. By definition, the word denotes diseases in plants caused by parasites, fungus, or insects. Blight can also signify destruction or frustration (OED). Thus, the murder taking place on the flower serves to taint its petals. The spider's actions work to destroy the connotations of innocence and beauty that go along with a white flower and to infect the plant so that it becomes a scene for evil and destruction. The death ironically takes place on a flower deemed, "heal-all." The plant, assumed to possess
restorative qualities, cannot heal the progression of nature. Instead of fixing the wrong which it encompasses, the flower's petals soon become a murder scene. The sixth line of the poem illustrates the evil tone set by word choice. The poet illustrates evil as something being made by combining the various characters in the action and likening them to "the ingredients of a witches' broth" (6). The mixture of the "snow-drop spider, a flower like froth, / And dead wings carried like a paper kite" join as elements serving destruction (7-8).
At first glance, the word choice used in one line of the poem does not seem to fit with the focus of the murderous occasion. Line five illustrates the combination of the spider, the moth, and the
flower as though they are "mixed ready to begin the morning right" (5). An incongruously happy line, its words define the combination of the predator and the prey as the best way to start off the morning. In this instance, perhaps the speaker is being ironic. By using descriptions of death in all of the other lines of the stanza, the fifth line provides an interesting contrast. The speaker questions the correctness of the normal patterns in life. While the progression of the food chain appears to be the way to "begin the morning right," the speaker questions such a design (5). By making a contrasting statement in the midst of a focused description of death, the speaker draws attention to the way such a morning is beginning. Existing among the death found in the rest of the stanza, line five ponders how deception and death, words associated with finality and the cessation of life, could possibly serve as an appropriate beginning.
Of course, the line may not be quite as incongruous as it seems. If the word, "right," serves as a pun for the word, "rite," then the line fits in nicely with its neighboring verses. Through this reading, the spider is the character responsible for involving the flower and the moth in a ceremonial display. Instead of focusing upon its denotation of correctness, "the morning right" involves sacrificing the moth to the proceedings of nature (6). In this way, the killing becomes a sacrificial rite that honors nature's design.
On the surface, color seems merely descriptive, but whiteness serves a deceptive function. The white spider, quite a rarity in nature, positions itself atop a white flower in order to remain camouflaged. The spider, normally connoting evil, wears a white guise, yet the color is only the surface cover of an underlying darkness. By hiding among the flower's white petals, the snow-drop spider is able to capture its prey. The white heal-all has been blighted by the insects upon it. As the snow white setting of the murder, the flower itself undergoes disease and decay. The moth may actually be the only element in the poem that normally exists in whiteness. The moth becomes the least guilty character. It is simply the resulting victim of the deceptive collaboration between the flower, hiding the predator, and the spider, stalking its prey. In such a scene, white takes on a very different meaning. The words suggest something that strays far from innocence. The whiteness that at first seemed to illustrate the innocent habits of nature's insects connotes evil, deception, and disease upon a second examination.
While the first stanza deals with observation, the poem's final sestet marks a change focusing upon the illumination of the speaker's mind. The speaker moves from describing his or her observation to questioning what far reaching implications derive from the observance. The poem adheres to its structural design as
it changes stanzas. Such a shift in thought is an expected convention of the Petrarchan sonnet. A physical break and changing content not only divide the octave and the sestet into separate stanzas, but a change also occurs in the type of statement being made by the speaker. Entering into a new section, the poem's lines shift from description to question. Setting up a type of interrogation design, each question is modeled according to a particular structure. The speaker asks three questions. The last question draws a conclusion. The final sestet continues in iambic pentameter. However, a deviation from the Petrarchan pattern occurs within its lines. The rhyme scheme shifts from its conventional pattern in the first eight lines to an unconventional one in the last six. Instead of maintaining the cde rhyme scheme in the poem's final tercets, the last lines form an irregular aca acc pattern. Such a small slip-up in convention suggests that the content may also depict similar deviations from the conventional ideas about design. In fact, the set structure that seems so natural in a process may not be its actual purpose or design at all.
The sonnet form, a rational structure framing the poem,
predominantly serves to illustrate the deviations from conventional design that are found in the content. The sestet's first question suggests that the speaker's original observations contained certain irregular oddities of nature. The speaker states, "What had that
flower to do with being white...?" (9). By posing such a question, the speaker implies that the flower's white color is irregular. The next line suggests that the heal-all is normally "wayside blue and innocent" (10). Thus, the spider's actions upon its surface not only changed its color from blue to white but also marred its innocence. Regardless, the second question suggests that the meeting of the spider and the moth was not the choice of each insect but, instead, was controlled by a greater force. The speaker ponders, "What brought the kindred spider to that height...?" (11). The line suggests that the spider's decision to climb atop the flower was not its own. Something "other" steered it there. A similar control "steered the white moth thither in the night" (12). Through line twelve, the speaker reveals that the deceptive spider captured its prey within the darkness of night. The line serves to sharply contrast the images of white and dark. The white flower holding the snow-drop spider stands out in stark contrast against the
darkness of night. In the same way that a moth is drawn to its death by a lamp, the victim moth, through an unnatural, controlling force, becomes attracted to what ultimately destroys it.
The final two lines of the poem identify the controlling force. Through a question, the poem reaches a conclusion. The final lines ask, "What but design of darkness to appall?-- / If design govern in a thing so small" (13-14). As Vendler notes, design signified
natural order and was thought to prove God's existence (421). However, the final question challenges God's omnipotence
throughout all of nature. Instead of proving a masterful and loving God, the murder scene upon the heal-all displays a "design of darkness" (13). Even within nature's tiniest aspects, evil and deception are at work within the natural world. The disorder found in the poem's example of the natural process questions God's ability to create harmony in the world. As the dark scene plays out against the flower's white backdrop, the speaker doubts God's omnipotent role in ordering things.
The design's function "to appall" provides further insight into the whiteness of the insects and the flower (13). Since the fourteenth century, "appall" has denoted paleness or changing color. Other common meanings define "appall" as "to weaken, enfeeble, or impair" and "to dismay, shock, or terrify" (OED). In addition to its connotations of sickness or disease, the white imagery so prevalent throughout the poem illustrates the role of the spider in making the scene white. The presence of God's hand in such a horrific, natural occurrence shocks the human onlooker and causes the scene to pale and lose its flourish. In fact, the heal-all's restorative powers are weakened. Each definition is at work in the scene of death. In this way, God's seeming lack of omnipotence in allowing such a design of darkness causes nature to lose its
innocent beauty and to become colorless and weak in a way that might dismay the observer.
Within the confines of structural consistency, Frost's "Design" presents a confused order that emerges to question what force is in control of nature. The poem's form relates to content only in the sense that it reveals a contrast between structural order and the disarray of design. Through the poem's title, Frost summons up ideas of order. However, the design that the work describes does not involve consistent patterns or controlled creations.
Alternatively, the poem summons an eternal human question concerning the injustice that exists in a world controlled by a just God. "Design" fails to discuss God's work in patterning the natural world in a particular way. Instead, the work illustrates a scheme that can be disorderly, harsh, and devious yet possessing meaning that may be truly understood only after viewing the world through God's eyes.
