"A thing so small": The Nature of Meter in Robert Frost's "Design"

"A thing so small":

The Nature of Meter in Robert Frost's "Design"

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, he did not appreciate just how profoundly Frost grasped the impact of Darwin's ideas on how we understand order, intention, and meaning.² Frost was nowhere more ahead of his time than in his understanding of one of English literature's oldest and most dominant conventions, iambic pentameter. Frost's conscious awareness, rather than intuitive sense, of the role meter plays in verse and how it does so anticipates generative metrics' account of iambic pentameter. Generative metrics also brings together science and literature, drawing on the insights of contemporary linguistics, especially in the field of phonology, in order to develop a universal grammar of metrical verse forms. Generative metrics suggests that literature is, at least at the level of its sonic material, an outgrowth of nature. Frost's "Design" asks if nature can be treated as a text, i.e., read and interpreted. This paper moves in the opposite direction; it asks if texts can be naturalized—described as possessing innate form—by examining the meter of "Design."

"Design" is a particularly apt subject because meter plays an important role in it, especially in the final line, where Frost poses his fundamental questions about natural and literary order. I will be using generative metrics to scan and interpret the poem. In doing so, I hope to introduce generative metrics to readers unfamiliar with it and convince them of its superiority to traditional scansion, not only for Frost but for all metrical verse. The best defense of the method will be a richer reading of "Design," one that shows how the oft-missed metrical event in the final line matters. Readers of poetry, unfortunately, too often treat meter as "a thing so small." The reasons for this neglect are not unrelated to "Design." Many students of poetry, hobbled by the unwieldy and uninformative apparatus of classical Greek prosody, struggle first even to discover the meter in a line of verse; worse, once they've done so, many are left asking, "Now what?" It is hard to find order, harder yet to find meaning. Much of the focus of this paper will be on the final line of "Design" and, more specifically, on the word "design" in the line; from a thing so small as where a word-stress falls in the meter of one line, Frost manages to make large claims about nature, matter, order, intention, and meaning.

I. Meaning and Matter

First published in 1922, Robert Frost's "Design" would seem to flaunt its insignificance in comparison to the much larger and far more radical works associated with that iconic year—T. S. Eliot's...