Design Summary & Analysis
by Robert Frost

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Robert Frost's "Design," first published in a 1922 anthology of American poetry, reflects on the argument that the complexity of the world proves that a supernatural creator (i.e., God) must have designed things. The speaker of stumbles across a strange sight one morning that, on one level, might indeed suggest a guiding hand bringing different elements of nature together: a white spider holding a dead white moth on top of a white flower. Finding this sight at once miraculous and grotesque, the speaker wonders what kind of higher power would "design" a world that contains such horror and suffering—if such a power exists at all. The poem was later included in Frost's Pulitzer-winning 1936 collection, A Further Range.

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