Design by Robert Frost.....
Design
Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963
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.
Biography of Poet.....Robert Frost .....
One of the most celebrated poets in America, Robert Frost was an author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes and a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony.
Design" is a poem of finding evil in innocence, a song of experience, though the voice is hardly that of Blake’s child-like singer. At first we hear the cheerfully observant walker on back-country roads: ‘I found a dimpled . . .’ The iambic lilt adds a tone of pleasant surprise: ‘I found a dimpled darling’—‘Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet!’ But in ‘spider’ the voice betrays itself, and in ‘fat’ and ‘white’ the dimpled creature appears less charming. On a small scale the first line, like the whole poem, builds up a joke in tone, rhythm, and image that grows into a ‘joke’ of another sort.
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.
One of the most celebrated poets in America, Robert Frost was an author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes and a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony.
Analysis of Design
Design is a Petrarchan sonnet with a changed sestet. It has fourteen lines (8+6) but the rhyme scheme is abbaabba acaacc with all of them full:
white/blight/right/kite/white/height/night and moth/cloth/broth/cloth and heal-all/appall/small.
The octet is in fact one long sentence broken up into various clauses by astute use of punctuation - dashes and commas - and enjambment - when a line carries on to the next without losing meaning.
Rhythm
The basic meter (metre in UK) is iambic pentameter, Frost's default, where a line has ten syllables and the de-DUM de-DUM rhythm is steady and familiar. For example:
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
The stresses come right after the non-stressed syllables so creating a kind of lilt. But other lines have mixed meter, which alters the stress and rhythm and creates emphasis whilst slowing down the pace:
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
Simile
In the third line the moth is likened to a piece of cloth and also in the eighth line, a paper kite. Spider, moth and flower are seen as the three ingredients of a witches' broth.
Alliteration
Alliteration in the second, seventh and thirteenth lines:
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth
What but design of darkness to appall?
Anaphora (Repetition)
Note that in the sestet lines 9, 11 and 13 begin with the word What, which reinforces rhythm in the latter part of the sonnet as each question is rolled out. This technique is used a lot in the book of Psalms from the bible.
No comments:
Post a Comment