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Robert Frost reads Design

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.

When Robert Frost reads his poem, at the end of the twelfth line you can hear him mutter to himself, “and then,” giving us an extra foot, a lazy iamb. Is it meant for the end the twelfth line or the beginning of the thirteenth? What exactly is Frost’s design here adding two more syllables to what he had originally written? Good art is always an organic thing, capable of change. And it remains somehow alive even after the poet dies.


Web Drawings by Akram

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