Design - Robert Frost (1936)

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. This poem can be found in The Norton Introduction to Poetry on page 297. My intuitive response to this poem is that Frost really paints a picture in my mind of a white spider holding a moth probably in its mouth on a blue and elegant flower and he wants us to think about how beauty and death do not necessarily have to be in different frames of mind.  The quote from The Sounds of Poetry, "the line and the syntactical unit are not necessarily the same" can be applied to this poem in the first stanza.  The quote means that although the first stanza is, in itself, is one sentence, each line of the stanza has a specific meaning and importance to the poem and that is why there is enjambment to the breaks after words like "moth" and "blight".  Another thing I noticed when analyzing this poem was that the largest accents were in the one syllable words at the end of each line.  I enjoyed the fact that there were not many largely accented words in the middle of lines which let me read the lines very quickly and then I could take a pause at the end of the line.  Also, each line had either 10 or 11 syllables and the only lines that did not rhyme were the first line of the first stanza and second line of the second stanza. This design of the poem makes reading very smooth and easy (in a good way) to me.   The first stanza is very classical ekphrasis in that Frost describes the artistic beauty of what is happening between the spider and the moth on the flower.  The second stanza turns to modern ekphrasis because Frost starts asking rhetorical questions to the reader and starts to engage the reader into answering questions on why and how this piece of art in front of him came to be. A reading of the poem can be found on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJuEsIRc530.