“I always wanted to be very observant,” Robert Frost once said, after reading his poem “Design” to an audience. He then added: “But I have always been afraid of my own observations.” What might Frost have observed that might scare him? Let’s look at the poem in question and see what we discover.
Beginning with the title, “Design”, any reader of this poem will find it full of meaning. As “Webster’s New World Dictionary” defines “Design”, the word can denote, among other things, a plan or “purpose; intention; objective”. Some arguments for the existence of god (I remember Sunday school) are based on the “argument from design”; that because the world displays a systematic order, there must be a designer who did it. But the word design can also mean “a secret or sinister plan”, like the one we attribute to a “designer person”. As we shall see, Frost’s poem incorporates all of these meanings. His poem raises the old philosophical question of whether there is a designer, an evil designer, or no designer at all. Frost probably read William James on this question, as one reviewer has convincingly shown.
Like many other sonnets, “Design” is divided into two parts. The first eight lines draw a picture centered on the spider, which seems almost cheerful at first. He has dimples and is fat like a baby or Santa Claus. It stands on a wild flower whose name, cure-all, seems ironic: a cure-all is supposed to cure any disease, but it certainly has no power to bring a dead moth back to life. In this second line we also discover that the spider has taken over another creature. We might immediately feel sorry for the moth, were it not for the simile applied to it in line three: “like a stiff white piece of satin cloth.” Suddenly the moth becomes not a creature but a piece of cloth, and yet satin has a connotation of beauty. Satin is a luxurious material used in rich formal garments such as coronation gowns and wedding dresses.