'Design' by Robert Frost

A Deconstruction Analysis

"I found a dimpled spider; fat and white,On a white heal-all, holding up a mothLike a white piece of rigid satin cloth --Assorted characters of death and blightMixed ready to begin the morning right,A snow-drop spider; a flower like a froth,Like ingredients of a witches' broth--And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What brought the kindred spider to that height,What had that flower to do with being white,The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?If design govern in a thing so small,Then steered the white mother thither in the night?What but design of darkness to appall?"

One of the most celebrated poets in America, Robert Frost often questions and meditates - through his poems - universal themes and this poem, Design, is no different.

'Design' might have opened in a subtle scene where a spider, a flower, and a moth are its central characters. The picture that the poem brings to the mind's eye of the reader is that of the beauty and intricacy of creation - and to appreciate it. He even suggests, quite explicitly, to the reader that such beauty is designed and that a 'creator', whose wisdom exceeds man, owned the hands that wove such intricate, special, and individual designs to every creation: from the biggest and incomprehensible down to the microscopic. Later on, however, a dark cloud descended upon this bright observation. The speaker of the poem then questions the role of the 'creator' in the doom of the 'creations'.

Analyzing the poem using the Deconstruction approach, we can see these binary oppositions in an implicit manner: life and death/ creation and destruction; light and darkness; predator and prey.