Design (1936)

Robert Frost

 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,

In White (1912)

Robert Frost

 

A dented spider like a snow drop white

On a white heal-all,

holding up a moth

Like a white piece of lifeless satin cloth—

Saw ever curious eye so strange a sight?—7

hollow in a hard surface made by a blow or by pressure 凹进

hollow in a hard surface made by a blow or by pressure 凹进百灵草，兰花草

Silk material smooth and shiny on one side

wither

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?

Portent in little,

assorted death and blight

Like the ingredients of a witches' broth?—

The beady spider, the flower like a froth,

And the moth carried like a paper kite.

 

What had that flower to do with being white,

Creamy mass of small bubbles; foam泡沫 \ 白沫

Portent—thing, esp. sth. marvelous or mysterious, that is a sign or warning ( of a future event)

One of the parts of mixture 配料

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 blue prunella every child's delight.

What brought the kindred spider to that height?

(Make we no thesis of the miller's plight.)

What but design of darkness and of night?

Design, design! Do I use the word aright?

Related; conspiratorial

The moth’s serious and difficult situation

“appall” is a particularly suitable words, in that it suggests both a specific color or the the lack of color(pallor) and the death (pall). The ambiguity of the word challenges the reader to interpret “correctly”: Does it mean”to shock?” “To make white?” “To kill?” All of the preceding?

Heal-All (Prunella vulgaris). 4

Wayside flower

 

SYMPTOMS OF BACTERIAL DISEASES

When bacterial diseases affect large sections of an entire leaf or plant, BLIGHT results. This photo shows bacterial blight of geranium （天竺葵）  caused by the bacterium Xanthomonas campestris pv. pelargonii. Because bacterial pathogens （微生物：病原菌） tend to be restricted in their movement by veins, often blighted areas on leaves caused by bacteria have a wedge （楔）  shape. The widest area of the wedge is at the edge of the leaf, the narrowest area near the petiole （叶柄 ). 

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The sonnet as an emblem poem

Symbol;device that represent sth.

Structurally, "Design" is as clear a model of the American emblem poem as we could ask for, its movement "from sight to insight" reflected in the conventional division of the sonnet into octave and sestet and underlined by the typographical separation of the two parts. The encounter with theArt or style of printingnatural emblem in the octave is essentially Thoreauvian: the poet,

evidently, is out wandering alone in nature, and the time is early morning. Many of Frost‘s darkest insights into the natural order occur at the emblematic moment when night descends; but the impact of the macabre(gruesome;suggesting death; 以死亡为主题；令人毛骨悚然的）  scene in “Design” is made more acute（ of sense—keen;sharp 敏感的）  by the bright expectations of what Thoreau calls "the most memorable season of

the day, . . . the awakening hour" (Walden 89), when the poet encounters these "Assorted characters of death and blight / Mixed ready to begin the rooming right." The natural "characters" represent a startling apparent violation of natural order: a wildflower which would normally be blue, a spider which would likely be dark, and a moth which might be almost any color are all the same

color—and, with Melvillian irony, that color is the white of purity or innocence. As Jarrell (an expert of Frost) notes, much of the descriptive detail in these lines is intended to heighten the grim contrast between the potential innocence—from the "dimpled" spider to the "dead wings carried like a paper kite"—and the actual horror of the scene. 

Such inverted innocence, in such a

small, even delicate scene, serves only to render the message that Frost reads in this tableau （生动的画面；场面） all the more dismaying: the evident “design of darkness to appall.” Even that brief formulation （制作配方） is steeped （浸泡） in irony. Here the shaped whiteness of a small emblem turns out to be not the whiteness of normal design, but of "design of darkness"; its effect is

to "appall" the observer, to make him turn pale or white with dread of such dark whiteness. 

Were "Design“ to end with its thirteenth line, it would be a powerful and ironic but relatively straightforward emblem poem. The final verse, however, threatens to call all in doubt—not just the evident lesson of natural darkness, but the entire epistemological （认识论的）

basis of reading the book of nature. That line—"If design govern in a thing so small“—questions the result and method of the rest of the poem, and the presuppositions of emblem reading, in the way Frost regularly questions his inherited assumptions. Neither in the context of this poem nor in the context of Frost‘s whole canon （基督教和天主教）教规；宗教法则） , however, does the last line deny the omnipresence of

design. 

This sonnet might almost have been written as a characteristic reaction by Frost to what he would consider the excesses of Emersonian optimism, as for instance this serene assertion: "I am not impressed by solitary marks of designing wisdom; I am thrilled with delight by the choral harmony of the whole. Design! It is all design. It

is all beauty" (Early Lectures I: 49). Frost is too Thoreauvian in his familiarity with natural fact, including its dismaying side, to accept so sweeping a concept of design. 

If we look at the poem as a whole, clearly design of some sort does "govern in a thing so small"—in the masterfully crafted sonnet itself, in its description in the octave which

both heightens and ironizes the drama, in its sestet which simultaneously invokes and questions the tradition of the argument from design. The real question which the last line raises is whose design this is—whether  that of God or nature or "darkness," on the one hand, or that of the observer, on the other. As William James puts it in Pragmatism: "the abstract word 'design' is a blank

cartridge(bullet). It carries no consequences, does no execution. What design, and what designer? are the only serious questions.". The implication for Frost, I think, is that the "design of darkness" or of nature or of God or is the design made by the perceiver, by the poet. Only the human eye can make or find any design in the natural world. Though the narrator's role in the drama is

intentionally and ironically minimized, it remains crucial in the two opening words of the poem: "I found" (or in the "curious eye" "Saw" of the draft version). Like all revelation, all design "has been ours." 

As the revised version of the last line of “Design” suggests, for a temperament （气质，性格） as willful and feisty ( 爱争吵的）

as Frost's, the occasional sense of the potential hostility and violence of the physical world, such as we see in the first thirteen lines of "Design, " is ultimately less appalling than the threat of emptiness or indifference.