The universe itself is a combination of different patterns of designs sewn together by an invisible thread. Though the existence of a higher God may be debatable, the true design of life, with all of its perfections and mutations, still remains a mystery to this day. Robert Frost, in his poem “In White” and its rewrite, “Design,” challenges the idea of whether or not God designs the imperfections of life. It is arguable to decide which poem is the better of the two, but when compared, “Design” is better because the imagery expressed is able to shock and horrify the audience more than the original version.
The imagery used in “Design” to depict the spider arouses stronger feelings from readers than the imagery used in “In White.” At first, the spider is described as “dented” (White, 1), but Frost changes this description into “dimpled” (Design, 1) and “fat and white” (Design, 1). Although this change in detail may seem peculiar, the new description causes readers to be more horrified than before. The reasoning is because Frost wants readers to think that the new description of the spider is, in a sense, “cute” while the original description is simply “irregular.” Readers are less horrified when an object that is seemingly “imperfect,” kills, and are more shocked when an object that is shown as “cute,” slaughters. The audience is biased and judges objects first on appearance, rather than actions. Readers assume that something that is described as “cute” is harmless, but Frost contradicts this idea by showing how the spider mercilessly catches the moth and violently sucks the juices out of it. The irony of a cute spider killing an innocent moth is horrifying, and Frost beautifully depicts this more in his rewrite than in his origina...
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...criptions of the flower, spider, and moth lets the audience experience more vivid imagery. This odd image of a white spider eating a white moth on a white, diseased flower arouses stronger feelings to come from the readers. The use of imagery is important, and in “Design,” Frost changes the details, language, and diction of the original poem in order to push readers to think about a stunning question: Does God design the details of the smaller things in life? The answer is debatable, and through vivid imagery, Frost puts readers in a position of thought. He wants the audience to question the design of life and by rewriting his original poem and making it better, Frost leads readers to another more in-depth question: If God does indeed design the smaller things in life, then does He also design the mutations and imperfections of the world, as shown with the heal-all?
With its ominous black body and blood-red markings, the black widow spider emanates an air of evil. The widow, notorious for its excessively lethal bite and vicious, voracious nature, has mystified scientists for years. Inspired by a fascinating, frightening childhood encounter with a black widow, essayist Gordon Grice discusses his lifelong fascination with the spider and explores the enigma surrounding it in his work “Caught in the Widow’s Web.” With a tone of malice and abhorrence, Grice focuses on the widow’s unnecessarily potent venom, a physical trait that seems to defy reason, evolution, and even the cosmic design. Through his use of the process and narrative modes of writing, diction with a tone of malice,
Grice uses many different modes throughout the essay to explain his underlying message about evil in the world to readers clearly. In the essay Grice uses description to better explain the black widow spider’s web. Leaves are dispersed in a black widow's web, beneath the leaves there are “husks of consumed insects, their antennae stiff as gargoyle horns” (para. 2). Around them are “splashes of the spider’s white urine, which looks like bird guano and smells of ammonia even at the distance of several feet” (para. 2). Grice's description on the black widow's web uses words that today are considered disgusting like urine and gargoyles which portrays a sense of what the web looks like along
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words,” Robert Frost once said. As is made fairly obvious by this quote, Frost was an adroit thinker. It seems like he spent much of his life thinking about the little things. He often pondered the meaning and symbolism of things he found in nature. Many readers find Robert Frost’s poems to be straightforward, yet his work contains deeper layers of complexity beneath the surface. His poems are not what they seem to be at first glance. These deeper layers of complexity can be clearly seen in his poems “The Road Not Taken”, “Fire and Ice”, and “Birches”.
Robert Frost wrote a poem – twice. The early version of the poem, “In White,” created a simple scene filled with anomalies. For some reason, years later the work beckoned for further attention. The poet complied and skillfully enhanced the work, rendering a finished poem that exceeds the scope of the original. Both versions of the Frost’s poem send a nuanced message to the thoughtful reader. While vague and open to interpretation, that message invites debate, an introspective feast. The poem “Design” demonstrates polished superiority through Frost’s mastery of imagery, amplified by devices, and unburdened language.
Frost is far more than the simple agrarian writer some claim him to be. He is deceptively simple at first glance, writing poetry that is easy to understand on an immediate, superficial level. Closer examination of his texts, however, reveal his thoughts on deeply troubling psychological states of living in a modern world. As bombs exploded and bodies piled up in the World Wars, people were forced to consider not only death, but the aspects of human nature that could allow such atrocities to occur. By using natural themes and images to present modernist concerns, Frost creates poetry that both soothes his readers and asks them to consider the true nature of the world and themselves.
Robert Frost wrote poetry about nature and it is that nature that he used as symbols for life lessons. Many critics have been fascinated by the way that Frost could get so many meanings of life out of nature itself. Frost‘s poetry appeals to almost everyone because of his uncanny ability to tie in with many things that one is too familiar with and for many, that is life in itself. “Perhaps that is what keeps Robert Frost so alive today, even people who have never set foot in Vermont, in writing about New England, Frost is writing about everywhere” (294).
Robert Frost uses metaphor and symbolism extensively in ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, developing deeper and more complex meanings from a superficially simple poem. Frost’s own analysis contributes greatly to our appreciation of the importance of metaphor, claiming that “metaphor [is] the whole of thinking,” inviting the reader to interpret the beautiful scene in a more profound way. However, the multitude of possible interpretations sees it being read as either carefully crafted lyric, a “suicide poem, [or] as recording a single autobiographical incident” . Judith Oster argues, therefore, that the social conditions individual to each reader tangibly alter our understanding of metaphor. Despite the simplicity of language, Frost uses conventional metaphors to explore complex ideas about life, death and nature. The uncertainty, even in the concluding stanza, that encompasses the poem only adds to the depth of possible readings.
...years later, it becomes clear that for all the emphasis put on art, on creation, and on mass production—nature is central to our human experience. We can symbolize this natural connection with art—but the art itself always harkens back to something that elicits an emotional response from the viewer. For Leontes, a statue of his presumably deceased wife, Hermione triggers a sorrowful reaction. Art indeed embellishes life as it does with flowers, but we are always working from some perspective, some emotion, before we are merely creating art. “The Winter’s Tale” takes on the challenge of investigating whether or not art can in fact breathe outside the womb of nature, and as we witness art break down, and nature hold the characters together, it becomes resoundingly clear that art seeks to react to nature, but that it cannot work without maintaining nature at its core.
Robert Frost’s “Design” is a poem of finding natural cruelty in the serenity of nature, a melody of understanding. Upon reading the first line, not unlike the whole poem, a joke in tone, rhythm is building up an image that grows into something else. In “Design”, the joking discovery progresses gradually through a sequence of conflicting images. . Frost uses imagery, allegory, and characterization to accomplish what could only be described as an American emblem poem. This essay will analyze Frost’s “Design”, interpreting the underlying message and overall theme Frost may have been trying to convey.
Robert Frost's "Design" is a Petrarchan sonnet that questions God's design of nature and if there truly is a design to life which is illustrated through the use of irony, simile, strong imagery, and a rhetoric question. The sonnet is composed of an octave with the rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA and a sestet with the rhyme scheme of ACAACC. The theme of the poem is written with a sense of admiration for nature, but a skeptic mind for the meaning behind the design of life.
Second Paper “I shall briefly explain how I conceive of this matter. Look round the world: Contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit subdivisions, to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men, who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles, though it much exceeds, the production of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since therefore the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man; though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work, which he has executed.
...ert Frost 's poems, I now see his poems in a different perspective. I once thought as many do, that Frost 's poems where about nature but now I know that Frost 's true intention was of “taking life by the throat” (Frost Interview). While others consider him as a nature poet, Frost doesn’t believe himself as one and we can see his perspective in his poems but especially in “Mowing,” “After Apple-Picking,” and “The Road Not Taken.” Frost actually uses nature as an analogy to human life experiences or the troubles that people go through. He reflects these poems back to his personal life and the struggles he has been through also. After researching and reading about Robert Frost I have became very fond his work and enjoy looking deeper into his work trying to picture what he truly meant. While Frost uses a simple idea like nature, he relates it back to human nature.
William Blake is a poet most noted for the engravings that accompany his works of poetry. These engravings included with the poems help to depict the meaning of the poems. However, at times the engravings he includes with his poem can lead to complications for the interpreter of the poem. There are a multitude of variations of the same engraving that accompany a poem, all of them originals; some of these engravings compliment the poem, while others complicate the poem. One example of this occurrence, where one engraving may compliment the poem and the other complicates it, is in William Blake’s work “The Ecchoing Green” which can be found in Blake’s Songs of Innocence. The important thing to recognize is that regardless of whether the poem is further complicated or simplified because of the image, the poem and its accompanying image are still evoking thought, and discussion from the reader.
Frost’s use of comparisons helps the reader to better interpret the meaning of this poem. The picture created, with his use of imagery allows the reader to view his work from various perspectives. His analogies are very pragmatic. The reader is able to relate to the speaker’s feelings. After reading this poem it gives the reader a sense of understanding why the speaker wished he could go back to his past so much.
The vivid imagery, symbolism, metaphors make his poetry elusive, through these elements Frost is able to give nature its dark side. It is these elements that must be analyzed to discover the hidden dark meaning within Roberts Frost’s poems. Lines that seemed simple at first become more complex after the reader analyzes the poem using elements of poetry. For example, in the poem Mending Wall it appears that Robert frost is talking about two man arguing about a wall but at a closer look the reader realizes that the poem is about the things that separate man from man, which can be viewed as destructive. In After Apple Picking, the darkness of nature is present through the man wanting sleep, which is symbolic of death.