This presentation is prepared to assist students to understand American Poet's Robert Frost's famous sonnet Design. This presentation is not a mere creation of the author, as it is based on various sources and purely designed to assist students in their examination. Quality of this presentation cannot be compared with original text and genuine resources. Students are advised to prefer the authentic texts and resources for better results.

1. '
‘Design'
by Robert Frost (1922)
'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.'

2.  In Frost's first stanza, which is a group of lines in a poem, the
speaker opens by describing a white spider hunting a white moth on
a heal-all. The heal-all is a flower with medicinal properties. The
flower holds the moth, but nothing can stop the dark forces of nature,
or in this case, the hungry spider. When the speaker mentions the
witches' broth, Frost implies that darkness lurks everywhere.
Humanity, according to Frost, is as unprotected as the moth on a
flower and as dangerous as the spider.

3. Structure
 Frost's 14-line poem is called an Italian sonnet, also
known as a Petrarchan sonnet. This kind of sonnet is
composed of two stanzas. The first eight lines make up
one stanza, while the second stanza is six lines.

4. Structure
 Frost's sonnet follows the traditional rhyme structure. The first
line, 'A,' rhymes with the fourth line. The second and third
lines, 'B,' also rhyme. This rhyme pattern is referred to as
'ABBA' and continues on within the next four lines, meaning
the rhyme scheme is 'ABBAABBA' for the first stanza.

5.  In the second stanza, the rhyme pattern shifts. We keep
the 'A' rhyme from the first stanza in the first, third and
fourth lines, and introduce a new rhyme in the second,
fifth and sixth lines. That means the rhyming pattern of
the second stanza is 'ACAACC.'

6.  The sonnet ends with a rhyming couplet. A rhyming couplet is
the last two lines of a sonnet and generally serves to wrap up
the poem's overall theme. In addition to the sonnet's strict
rhyme scheme, the sonnet also follows iambic pentameter,
which means each line is ten syllables, five unstressed
syllables and five stressed syllables.
X / X / X / X / X /
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white

7. Analysis and Themes
 While Frost's poetry is very traditional in form, the poet is
known for his dark and modern take on universal themes such
as the existence of God. 'Design' is no exception. Frost's
traditional sonnet is a metaphor for the narrator, in his own
way, trying to control and understand nature's chaos.

8. Analysis and Themes
 The poem's imagery of a white spider suggests that even
within evil, there is goodness and purity. While the moth
represents the spider's prey, Frost also mentions the
medicinal flower, the heal-all, which suggests that life is
full of both evil and innocence. The moth and the spider
become a symbol for humanity. In other words, we are all
products of these natural forces, not spiritual design. The
last couplet,
 'What but design of darkness to appall?
 If design govern in a thing so small'

9. Birches
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice storms do. Often you must have seen them 5
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells 10
Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed 15
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun. 20

10. But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter of fact about the ice storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball, 25
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them, 30
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise 35
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. 40

11. So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs 45
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May not fate willfully misunderstand me 50
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk 55
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

12. Summary
 When the speaker sees bent birch trees, he likes to think
that they are bent because boys have been “swinging”
them. He knows that they are, in fact, bent by ice storms.
Yet he prefers his vision of a boy climbing a tree carefully
and then swinging at the tree’s crest to the ground. He
used to do this himself and dreams of going back to
those days. He likens birch swinging to getting “away
from the earth awhile” and then coming back.
Form
 This is blank verse, with numerous variations on the
prevailing iambic foot.

13.  The title is “Birches,”
 but the Subject is birch “swinging.”
 Theme of poem seems to be, more generally and more deeply,
this motion of swinging. The force behind it comes from contrary
pulls—truth and imagination.
 earth and heaven, concrete and spirit, control and abandon, flight
and return.
 We have the earth below, we have the world of the treetops and
above, and we have the motion between these two poles.

14.  Upward thrust is toward imagination, escape, and
transcendence—and away from heavy Truth with a
capital T.
 The downward pull is back to earth. Likely everyone
understands the desire “to get away from the earth
awhile.”
 The attraction of climbing trees is likewise universal.
 Climbing the tree: For the boy, it is a form of play; for the
man, it is a transcendent escape.
 The speaker wants to come back: “Earth’s the right place
for love,”
 As a tree, birch is rooted in the ground; in climbing it, one
has not completely severed ties to the earth.

15. The language of the poem
 conversational and, in parts, gently humorous:
Ex: “But I was going to say when Truth broke in /
With all her matter of fact about the ice storm.”
 The description of the post-ice storm birch trees is vivid
and evocative.

16.  Frost also imbues the poem with distinct sexual imagery.
The idea of tree-climbing, on its own, has sexual
overtones.
 Ex: One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer.
As are these more sensual:
 You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

17.  The whole process of birch swinging iterates that of sex.
 Critics noted that “Birches” is a poem about erotic
fantasy, about a lonely, isolated boy who yearns to
conquer these trees sexually. It is a testament to the
richness of the poem.