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9.1
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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
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Read poems about / on: flower, snow, death, night
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Mark Lewis Berryann
(11/22/2009 10:41:00 AM) |
Life from invisible to right in our faces seems as if all by design. Not preordained but, finding our place instinctively and then feeding off of each other.10
Mark
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Andrew Hoellering
(5/28/2009 9:18:00 AM) |
Frost’s brilliance emerges in the difference between this final version and its preliminary, In White. A comparison of the two poems is illuminating. In Design he changes the first line to ‘I found a dimpled spider, fat and white.’
‘Lifeless’ becomes ‘vivid’(L.3) and the fourth line ‘Assorted characters of death and blight.’ ‘Snow-drop’ replaces ‘beady’ in Line 7, and the 8th line now reads ‘And dead wings carried like a paper kite.’
Each substitution is more realistic, convincing and ominous, foreshadowing Design’s conclusion:
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appal? -
If design govern in a thing so small.
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