"Design" by Robert Frost

List of images:
-dimpled, fat, white
-white heal-all
-white, rigid, satin cloth
-assorted characters of death and blight
-ingredients of a witch's broth
-snow-drop spider
 -dead wings, paper kite
-blue and innocent heal-all
-kindred spider
-steered the white moth
-design of darkness appall

Robert Frost’s poem “Design” is filled with imagery that helps to portray the uncertainties he has in God’s planning within the universe.  By using simple diction, Frost illustrates a seemingly ordinary event of a spider eating a moth, into a dark and evil scene. 

In the first few lines, Frost repeatedly uses the word white, therefore suggesting an image of purity and innocence.  Frost describes a white spider holding a white moth on a white flower.  It is unusual that these figures are all illustrated as being white, when they normally are not that color.  He says the spider is “white” and “fat,” insinuating that the spider has been previously feasting.  Frost’s unusually description of a heal-all flower as being “white,” when usually they are blue, implies that this flower is safe and pure.  As Frost describes the moth, he again uses “white” suggesting the moth’s life was innocently taken away by the spider.   Frost then goes on to explain that the spider, flower, and the moth are “assorted characters” chosen to as “ingredients of a witch’s broth.”  The “witch’s broth” creates a stark contrast between the previous white and innocent figures to a dark and frightening scene.  However, while there are the images of a “witch’s broth,” “death and blight,” and “dead wings,” Frost maintains the figures previous innocent depiction.  At the volta of the poem, Frost begins to question why the flower, moth, and spider have all come together, especially because of the contradiction between the purity of the color white they bare and the darkness associated with the death of the moth by the spider.  He then proposes that these three white figures could have come together by an evil force or that there is no reason for their presence together, especially at such a small level.

The images of white correlate to the title of “design,” which suggests that these figures were created to specifically be together by some other power for a particular purpose.  This is again portrayed when Frost implies that the elements added to the “witch’s broth” are mixed together for a reason.  Because Frost groups these figures together not only in the “witch’s broth” but by also by their color, he is suggesting that they were designed by one single higher power.  By providing the reader with images of darkness and wickedness, he indicates that the higher power controlling the universe may not have good intentions, but instead evil ones.  With the mixing of light and dark images, Frost’s poem vaguely offers an answer to his uncertainty on whether God exists and if God exists with good intentions.