Plan or Chance?: The Meaning of Life in Robert Frost's "Design"

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that creates the central tension of the poem. While almost every word and its placement, every punctuation mark and image works to produce this tension, ultimately Frost offers no resolution of the tension. Although the title and many elements in the poem suggest that Frost sees life as an experience that is controlled and designed by a cruel being--much like the perspective Virginia Woolf offers in her essay "Old Mrs. Grey, I ultimately believe that the poem remains ambiguous. Good or bad, design or fluke, Frost builds this poem not to offer his readers an easy answer about life. Instead he sets up a multi-faceted argument about life which his readers have to resolve, if they can, for themselves.
The poem begins simply enough. In the first three lines, Frost tells his readers a story about finding a white spider sitting on a white flower. In the spider's arms is a white moth, which readers find out later is dead. What draws the audience's more serious attention to this ...

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"design" in the poem suggests that some other entity or force has specifically created the white heal-all, the white spider, and the white moth and has brought them together for a particular purpose. Design seems to be Frost's initial answer to his own questions not just because "Design" is the title of the poem, thereby being the first impression readers receive when reading the poem, but because of the elaborate design of the poem itself. "Design" is a strict Petrarchan sonnet. It has iambic pentameter and a very limited rhyme scheme, abbaabbaacaacc, in which there are only three different rhymes. It is clearly divided into an octet and sestet in which Frost sets up the situation ...

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