The Lovely Design of Doom

A fat and white spider

A white moth

White piece of rigid satin cloth

Dead wings

Paper kites

Heal-all

Design of darkness

Witches’ broth

Snow-drop spider

Robert Frost’s poem, “Design,” tells a story about the circle of life. The dimpled spider on white heal-all catches its prey, the white moth. The adjectives fat and white describe what the spider looks like. The word fat showed that the spider feeds well in order to sustain life and satisfy its hunger. The line that says “like a white piece of rigid satin cloth” does not make any sense because satin cloths cannot be rigid which makes this sentence abstract and incoherent, but it does describe the moth.

 Death is definitely described in this poem in the line “death and blight” that compare with the “ingredients in a witches’ broth.” Witches are a negative aspect and death and blight, a plant disease, become mixed into this shows how deadly situation can be for the moth. Frost used the color white to describe the two most important creatures in this poem, the white spider along with the white moth. White is usually symbolic for innocence which this poem does not show by having nature take place and showing how the circle of life works.

The beginning of the second stanza asked why the flower was white when the color white usually meant purity and perfection when that very flower allowed the white spider to sit there and be hidden, waiting for an insect to pass by and fall into the trap that leads to the kill. Towards the ending of the second stanza, the poem showed how even the most beautiful thing can be deadly. The design that the spider created was as trap in which the moth falls prey. It is just nature and natural for the little spider to create such a huge design that “govern in a thing so small” so the spider can live and feed itself. That is just how nature works. The living creatures are either on the top or on the bottom of the food chain. In order to survive, the creatures must kill to nourish their own bodies to live. Nature does not have sides, it just either benefits one or the other. The spider having to be white was able to use the white flower as its advantage to camouflage itself so others would not see it.