Modernism/modernity

Murphy, James.
"A thing so small": The Nature of Meter in Robert Frost's "Design"
Modernism/modernity - Volume 14, Number 2, April 2007, pp. 309-328

The Johns Hopkins University Press

James Murphy - "A thing so small": The Nature of Meter in Robert Frost's "Design" - Modernism/modernity 14:2 Modernism/modernity 14.2 (2007) 309-328 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents "A thing so small": The Nature of Meter in Robert Frost's "Design" James Murphy Robert Frost's "Design" is a poem about interpretation. The sonnet's speaker finds a white spider eating a white moth on an unnaturally white flower. The sheer unlikelihood of this event leads him to ask what the meaning of it could be and, more fundamentally, whether the question of meaning is appropriate at all. The final line--"If design govern in a thing so small."--is, despite its period, not a declaration but a double question. Question one: Is there design in the natural world? Question two: If there is, then what? Does natural design mean anything? These questions -- What am I looking at, why is it there, and what might it mean?--are, of course, basic to literary interpretation. "A thing so small," thus, refers to the poem "Design" as well as the spider's meal. What makes Frost's poem remain challenging even today is the way it brings the literary and the natural together. In "Design" and his thinking about literary form, especially meter, Frost displays a remarkably prescient sense of the ways science and literature would move closer to each other as the twentieth century went on. When Richard Poirier revealed the legacy of William James and his response to Darwin in the poem,...