More handpicked essays just for you.
Use of symbolism in robert frost poetry
Imagery & symbolism in frost's poetry
Why frost wrote the design poem
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
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. To begin with, the title refers to the idea, as William James writes in Pragmatism, "God's existence has from time immemorial been held to be proved by certain natural facts.... Such mutual fitting of things diverse in origin argued design, it was held; and the designer was always treated as a man-loving deity” (James, ne). At first, the cheerfully perceptive stroller on backcountry roads: “I found a dimpled…” (593) the iambic lilt supplements a tone of pleasurable astonishment. With the introduction of “spider”, he betrays himself, and in “fat” and “white”, the dimpled insect appears less amiable. Additionally, in the next line, “On a white heal-all…” the verse is suggestive of innocence and fortification (Frost, 593). The white heal-all, which for the most part is a light blue flower, is how Frost suggests the purity of the situation. Subsequently, the spider, “holding up a moth” draws out the evil or cruelty, which is nature. Frost accents this in the subsequent verse, “Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth” (Frost, 593). His play on words here is prodigious, “a white piece of satin cloth” (Frost, 593) this stanza demonstrates ... ... middle of paper ... ...ed by many scholars as his best work. It is through his awareness of the merit, the definitive disconnectedness, of nature and man that is most viewable in this poem. Throughout this essay, Frosts messages of innocence, evil, and design by deific intrusion reverberate true to his own personal standpoint of man and nature. It is in this, that Frost expresses the ideology of a benign deity. Works Cited Frost, Robert. "Design" Literature: A Pocket Anthology. Ed. R.S. Gwynn. 5th ed. New York: 2012 593. Print. James, William. "Pragmatism." Columbia University, New York. January 1907. Lecture. Web. 24 Feb 2012.< http://www.authorama.com/book/pragmatism.html> NA, . "A Critical Analysis of Robert Frost's "Design"." Academic Help. Academic Help, 08 October 2010. Web. 16 Feb 2012. .
Frost, Robert. "Mending Wall." Responding to Literature. 2nd Ed. Ed. Judith A. Stanford. Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Co. 1996. 1212-1213.
Selected Poems by Robert Frost, New York: Barnes and Noble, 2001 3.Graham, Judith, ed. Current Biography Yearbook Vol. 1962, New York: The H.W Wilson Company, 1993 4.Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, New York: Penguin Group, 1962 5.Weir, Peter. Dead Poets Society, 1989
Frost, Robert. “The Road Not Taken.” Literature and the Writing Process. Ed. Elizabeth McMahan et al. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2007. 695-696. Print.
Lawson, Bryan. How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified. 4th ed. Oxford: Architectural Press, 2006.
“Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions, there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.”(Rand, Paul)
In the first stanza, the speaker portrays contrasting forces of good and evil within nature to argue that the spider is in control. In the first line, “I found a dimpled spider, fat and white”, contrasting meanings are already evident (1). The adjective “dimpled” is used most often to describe a smile, which is universally accepted as a sign of happiness. Continuing...
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).
Last year, MoMA held a special exhibition, Applied design, to show how design has branched out in new directions and attracting worldwide attention. In an exhibition’s description, they argued that “Like physics, design will be loosely divided into the theoretical and the applied. Theoretical de...
Richard Wilbur's recent poem 'Mayflies' reminds us that the American Romantic tradition that Robert Frost most famously brought into the 20th century has made it safely into the 21st. Like many of Frost's short lyric poems, 'Mayflies' describes one person's encounter with an ordinary but easily overlooked piece of nature'in this case, a cloud of mayflies spotted in a 'sombre forest'(l.1) rising over 'unseen pools'(l.2),'made surprisingly attractive and meaningful by the speaker's special scrutiny of it. The ultimate attraction of Wilbur's mayflies would appear to be the meaning he finds in them. This seems to be an unremittingly positive poem, even as it glimpses the dark subjects of human isolation and mortality, perhaps especially as it glimpses these subjects. In this way the poem may recall that most persistent criticism of Wilbur's work, that it is too optimistic, too safe. The poet-critic Randall Jarrell, though an early admirer of Wilbur, once wrote that 'he obsessively sees, and shows, the bright underside of every dark thing'?something Frost was never accused of (Jarrell 332). Yet, when we examine the poem closely, and in particular the series of comparisons by which Wilbur elevates his mayflies into the realm of beauty and truth, the poem concedes something less ?bright? or felicitous about what it finally calls its 'joyful . . . task' of poetic perception and representation (l.23).
Lawson, Bryan. How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified. NY: Architectural Press, 1980, 2007. Massachusetts: NECSI Knowledge Press, 2004.
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.
"Frost, Robert." Magill's Survey of American Literature. Volume 2. New York: Marshall Cavendish Corporation, 1998. p.713-729.
The consistent pattern of metrical stresses in this stanza, along with the orderly rhyme scheme, and standard verse structure, reflect the mood of serenity, of humankind in harmony with Nature. It is a fine, hot day, `clear as fire', when the speaker comes to drink at the creek. Birdsong punctuates the still air, like the tinkling of broken glass. However, the term `frail' also suggests vulnerability in the presence of danger, and there are other intimations in this stanza of the drama that is about to unfold. Slithery sibilants, as in the words `glass', `grass' and `moss', hint at the existence of a Serpent in the Garden of Eden. As in a Greek tragedy, the intensity of expression in the poem invokes a proleptic tenseness, as yet unexplained.
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.
In this poem he now talks about water. The reader can see how powerful the water is when it eats away at the cliff. The shore was lucky by being backed by the cliff. Once again Frost is discussing water which goes back to stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening by stating the water because there is water in this poem with snow Frost keeps bringing up water and snow.