Skip to main content

Design.

Design- Robert Frost.


 Summary.

The poem begins with a simple setup the first three lines introduce us to the main characters. We have a big white spider on a white flower, poised to eat a white moth. The speaker sees this bizarre little albino meeting as some weird witches' brew, as all three are brought together for some awful reason.

That observation leads the speaker to a series of questions: Why is this flower white, when it is usually blue? What brought the spider to that particular flower? What made the moth decide to flutter by right then?


Frost concludes that if it were "design" that brought these three together, it must be some pretty dark design. In other words, it's not a comforting thought to think that God went out of his way just to make sure this moth got eaten. But that's the crucial "if" of the last line: if design does govern these small things. The reader is left with just as many questions as Frost. This short poem takes a simple little thought and pushes us all the way to questioning the very nature of creation and life as we know it.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Mystic Drum.

The Mystic Drum - Gabriel Okara. About Poet. Gabriel Okara is a Nigerian poet and novelist   Okara’s   Poetry  is based on a series of contrasts in which symbols are neatly balanced against each other. The need to  reconcile   the extremes of experience (life and death are common themes) preoccupies his verse, and a typical poem has a circular movement from everyday reality to a moment of joy and back to reality again. Summary. The drum in African poetry, generally stands for the spiritual pulse of traditional African life. The poet asserts that first, as the drum beat inside him, fishes danced in the rivers and men and women danced on the land to the rhythm of the drum. But standing behind the tree, there stood an outsider who smiled with an air of indifference at the richness of their culture. However, the drum still continued to beat rippling the air with quickened tempo compelling the dead to dance and sing with their shadows. The ancestral gl...
Post a Comment
Read more

Minority

Minority- Imtiaz Dharker I was born a foreigner. I carried on from there to become a foreigner everywhere I went, even in the place planted with my relatives, six-foot tubers sprouting roots, their fingers and faces pushing up new shoots of maize and sugar cane. All kinds of places and groups of people who have an admirable history would, almost certainly, distance themselves from me. I don’t fit, like a clumsily translated poem; like food cooked in milk of coconut where you expected   Ghee or cream, the unexpected aftertaste of cardamom or neem   . There’s always a point that where the language flips into an unfamiliar taste; where words tumble over a cunning tripwire on the tongue; were the frame slips, the reception of an image not quite tuned, ghost-outlined, that signals, in their midst, an alien. And so I scratch, scratch through the night, at this growing scab on black and white. E...
Post a Comment
Read more

Palanquin Bearers.

Palanquin Bearers-  Sarojini Naidu. Summary. Palanquin bearers is a melodious poem. The poem describes the scene of a bride being carried on a palanquin. The poem generates images of royal wives being carried on a palanquin to their husbands house. The men who carried the palanquin felt that their job was special and did it with much happiness. The similies in the poem point to the fact that the men did not feel that their job was tiresome. Some examples of the same are, 'Softly, O softly we bear her along', 'She hangs like a star in the dew of our song' and 'Lightly, O lightly we glide and we sing'. Palanquin bearers is melodious and one of the most appealing poems of Sarojni Naidu. The poem describes the beauty of the bride while she is being carried in a palanquin. We are reminded of one of the ancient customs of carrying royal brides in India in decorated carriages to their husband’s home. Occasionally, the men of the royal families would trav...
2 comments
Read more