Brief overview of Robert Frost poems: 1)'The Gift outright 2) 'design'.

1. Name:Trivedi Disha Hiteshbhai
Paper no: 10 (American Literature)
Topic: Brief overview of Robert Frost poems:
1) ‘design’ and 2) ‘the gift outright’.s
Year: 2015-2017
M.A.Sem=3
Submitted to: Smt. S.b.gardi department of
English M. K. Bhavnagar University

2. About author
 Born in 1874, san
Francisco, California.
 Had many jobs including
he taught Latin, textile
mill, etc.
 Most of works comes
from his own life
experience and
loneliness.
 Married many time.
 He has dream to take a
Nobel prize for literature.
Robert Frost

3. Themes of Robert frost
poetry
 Nature
 Communication
 Everyday life
 Isolation of the individual
 Duty
 Rationality v/s imagination
 Rural life v/s urban life

4. Structure of ‘Design’
 Frost 14 line poem is called sonnet, also
known as Petrerchan sonnet.
 This kind of sonnet is composed two stanzas.
 Frost sonnets follows traditional rhyme
structure, ‘ABBA’.
 Sonnet end with rhyming couplet.
 A rhyming couplet is the last two line of a
sonnet and generally serves to wind up the
poems overall theme.

5. Key point of ‘design’
 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.
 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 govern in a these small things. (What if—gulp—there's no design at
all, and everything in life is just totally random occurrences?)
 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.

6. flower moth Spider

7. The gift outright
 Poem opens with poet’s love for his country.
 Poet says that land was there before they belong to that land.
More than 100 years before.
 Every state of America settlers considered that land as their
own motherland. But it was unfortunate that still they where
not possessed, accepted by the native people.
 Settlers made study that why they are not accepted by the
native Americans.
 Finally they found that the reason was different lifestyle.
 After that off course they where accepted but for that they
have to struggle a lot.
 That surrender was unconditional.
 this is that country gets from the settlers and those settlers
get this country as a gift.

8. References:
 http://www.shmoop.com/design-robert-
frost/summary.html