Robert Frost’s poem “Design” opens with an octave describing the scene of a white spider, on a white mint plant, devouring a white moth. There are a multitude of things I found interesting in this poem.

• Repeatedly describing the characters in the scene as being a pure white, especially the spider as being a “snow-drop” white, intentionally misleads the reader into the idea that the characters of this scene represent innocence. Line 4, “Assorted characters of death and blight” and Line 8 “What had that flower to do with being white,” point out that the characters of this scene are deceptively not innocent, the characters of the scene are all assorted in a way that brings about “death” and “blight“, and that the mint plant being white does nothing to affect the innocence of these characters.

• The poem “Design” implies that the characters of the poem are intentionally and malevolently “designed” in such a way to bring about death and blight. Its interesting that it does so by repeatedly asking questions about the nature of this design in the second stance. Lines 11 to 14 best show this “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.”

• The final stance of the poem, which ask important questions about the nature of creation, reminds me a lot of William Blake’s “Tyger Tyger”. However, I think, that “Tyger Tyger” concedes by accepting that god creates both good and evil. “Design” just says that god, or whoever the creator is, is responsible for the “design of darkness.”

• Take everything I say in this final bullet point with multiple grains of salt. The poem “Design” and the poem “The Second Coming” by Yeats were both published post-WW1, and both seem to share some sort of pessimism about the world. “The Second Coming” does so in describing a vision of a bleak possibly-apocalyptic future for humanity, “Design” does so in saying that the world was designed in a malevolent way. It isn’t completely unreasonable to say that the events of WW1 had some sort of influence on the ideas of these poems. “Design” and “Tyger Tyger” also remind me of Gnosticism, or one of the core ideas, that the world is inherently flawed and made by a flawed creator. This probably is less so with “Tyger Tyger” with William Blake being a super devoted Christian (Gnosticism is a heretical ideology).

These are my thoughts (which I hope are coherent) on Robert Frost’s poem “Design”. I would like to explore more post-WW1, post-WW2, and Gnostic art and poetry in the future.