frost design

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

James Murphy

Modernism/modernity, Volume 14, Number 2, April 2007, pp. 309-328

(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/mod.2007.0044

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Universittsbibliothek Bern (2 Apr 2014 11:19 GMT)

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MURPHY /a thing so small

309

J. Stephen Murphy

is a PhD student inEnglish at the University

of California-Berkeley,

where he is completing

his dissertation, Mod-

ernist Revision and the

Matter of Form. This

study examines the his-

torical development

of modernist theories

and practices of revi-

sion, paying particular

attention to the ten-

sions revision creates

between historicism

and formalism.

MODERNISM/modernity

VOLUMEFOURTEEN, NUMBER

TWO, PP309328.

2007 THEJOHNSHOPKINS

UNIVERSITYPRESS

A thing so small:

The Nature of

Meter in Robert Frosts Design1

James Murphy

Robert Frosts Design is a poem about interpretation. The

sonnets 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 lineIf design govern in a thing so small.is,

despite its period, not a declaration but a double question. Ques-

tion one: Is there design in the natural world? Question two: If

there is, then what? Does natural design mean anything? These

questionsWhat 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 spiders

meal. What makes Frosts poem remain challenging even today

is the way it brings the literary and the natural together.

In Design and his thinking about literary form, especiallymeter, 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 Darwins ideas on how we understand order, intention,

and meaning.2Frost was nowhere more ahead of his time than in

his understanding of one of English literatures oldest and mostdominant conventions, iambic pentameter. Frosts 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


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M O D E R N I S M /m o d e r n i t y

310 linguistics, especially in the field of phonology, in order to develop a universal gram-

mar of metrical verse forms. Generative metrics suggests that literature is, at least at

the level of its sonic material, an outgrowth of nature. Frosts 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 naturalizeddescribed as possessing innate formby

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. Readersof 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 theyve 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 Frosts Design would seem to flaunt its insignifi-

cance in comparison to the much larger and far more radical works associated with

that iconic yearT. S. Eliots The Waste Landand James Joyces Ulysses. The poems

reference, in its final line, to a thing so small is intended to hold a mirror up to itself.

The poem is small in size (a sonnet), in subject matter (a spiders eating of a moth

on a mutated flower), and, it may seem, in ambition. What Design shares with The

Waste Landand Ulyssesis an anxiety over the source of order and meaning; the ques-

tion, at its most basic, is are they made or found? The debate between idealism and

realism is ancient, but it gained energy on both sides at the turn of the century with

the enormous growth of capitalisms ability to commodify reality and with advances in

the natural and physical sciences, which at once seemed to penetrate deeper into the

truth of the universe and to make that truth more abstract and mysterious. As science

and commerce despiritualize every corner of modern life, how is one to find or createmeaning? Indeed is meaning to be found, or is it created by artists?

In Ulysses, Order, and Myth, Eliot took the latter position, arguing that modern-

ist art must stop emulating the mummified stuff from a museum and invent new

forms of representation as a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a


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311significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary

history.3Eliot claimed that the mythic method of Ulysseshad the importance of a

scientific discovery and he often displayed a fondness for scientific terms in his criti-

cism, but he was interested in science more as a source for metaphors than as a method

for discovering the worlds order (177). This lip service to science, as Timothy Steele

has suggested in his study of the modernists rejection of metrical verse, was common

among the high modernists, who often enough misunderstood the science they drew

on in their critical writing.4

Frost, on the other hand, took science, particularly Darwin, very seriously, as Robert

Faggen has shown.5The major contribution Darwins work made to Frosts thought

was that it forced him to think hard about the paradox that as humanity grew more

intellectually and culturally sophisticated, the distance between it and nature shrank

rather than grew. We might be natures most creative inventors, but we are also naturesmost creative invention. While the rest of the world fretted about how far away we were

from the natural world, an anxiety that came to a head three years after Design was

published, in the Scopes monkey trial, Frost realized that Darwins really radical idea

was that nature was not so far away from us. It can design incredible worlds of order

and do so without any intelligence or spirit at all. This ideanot only that the material

world possesses order but also that it can create itmade Darwin the most dangerous

of all materialists. Frost realized early on that evolution mattered for modern artists

and thinkers mainly as a question of design.6

II. Design, design!

Design is not wholly a product of 1922; the poem began life circa 1912 as In

White. Frost made several significant revisions to the poem, none more meaningful

than his rewriting of the final line, which originally read, Design, design! Do I use

the word aright (14)? While the ending of Design is superior to this conclusion, it

is unfortunate that we lost the line because it gave voice to an anxiety raised by the

advent of modern science, exacerbated by Darwin, and still troubling contemporary

culture.

So what is Frost asking here? As indicated by his repetition of the word, he is wor-

rying about the relation between the two most commonly used senses of the noun

design, here summarized from the Oxford English Dictionary.

I. A mental plan

1. A plan or scheme conceived in the mind and intended for subsequent

execution

2. In weaker sense: Purpose, aim, intention

II. A plan in art

1. A preliminary sketch for a picture or other work of art; the plan of

a building or any part of it, or the outline of a piece of decorative

work.


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312 2. The combination of artistic details or architectural features which

go to make up a picture, statue, building, etc.; the artistic idea as

executed.7

The noun design designates a mental plan or intention and a physical plan or formalorder. In the very word itself, we observe the split between idealism and materialism.

Design designates both interiority and exteriority, priority and posterity. Modern French

goes to the trouble to distinguish between these two senses, with the first sense (here-

after D1) translated desseinand the second sense (D2) dessin(OED Online). Frosts

dilemma in In White and Design is not so much to decipher the meaning of the

design laid out before him, but to decide whether D2 (artfully laid out form) indicates

D1 (an intention and, thus, an intender) or whether D2 can exist without D1.8

Frost is essentially rehearsing the Argument from Design, which predates the

Enlightenment but became prominent then as a way to bring science and theology

into accord. It relied on and reinforced the identification between order (D2) and

intention (D1), through an exercise somewhat akin to what is known today as reverse

engineeringtaking the end result and working backward to the cause. The philoso-

pher Daniel Dennett has laid out the structure of the Argument from Design in his

Cosmic Pyramid:

GOD

MIND

DESIGN

ORDERCHAOS

NOTHING9

The Cosmic Pyramid mirrors not only the hierarchy of being, from the top down, but

also the path that the rational believer follows up to God.

But then Darwin came along and revealed the fundamental error of the Argument

from Design. The move from order to design is fine, but mind is a non sequitur. It was

Darwins discovery of Natural Selection that made it no longer necessary to go from the

wonderful, even seemingly intelligent design of the world to an intelligent designer.

Natural Selection explains the creation of immensely sophisticated order through,

as Dennett puts it, nothing but a set of individually mindless steps succeeding each

other without the help of any intelligent supervision (59). Darwins dangerous idea,

Dennett explains, is that Design can emerge from mere Order via an algorithmic

process that makes no use of pre-existing Mind (83). This algorithmic process, in

which traits that are useful for the survival of a species are preserved by passing them

onto offspring (i.e. Natural Selection), is so powerful that it presents the illusion of aguiding force, an Intelligence, in Nature. Dennett points out, however, that Darwin

and his intellectual descendents showed this Intelligence could be broken into bits

so tiny and stupid that they didnt count as intelligence at all, and then distributed

through space and time in a gigantic, connected network of algorithmic process. The

work [of designing new forms of order] must get done, but which work gets done is

largely a matter of chance (133).


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313Darwins dangerous idea has garnered less than universal support. Even within the

world of science, the adaptationist program continues to be put into question, most

famously by Stephen Jay Gould, but also by Noam Chomsky, who along with other

linguists, has engaged Steven Pinker and others in a debate over the evolutionary status

of language. Frost himself had reservations over Darwin, but he realized that after

Origin of Speciesthe Argument from Design was as dead as the dodo. Design, as the

product of that realization, puts not one, not two, but three nails in its coffin.

III. Demolishing the Argument from Design, Version 1

Lets start at the beginning, by briefly recapitulating the drama of Design.

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,On a white heal-all, holding up a mothLike a white piece of rigid satin clothAssorted characters of death and blightMixed ready to begin the morning right,Like the ingredients of a witches brothA 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.

An observer, perhaps during his morning constitutional, discovers a white spider (a fairly

common color for the type of spider, most likely a crab spider [Thomisidae], which is

able, in some cases, to change color and which lays in wait on flowers to eat, amongother things, moths) eating a white moth (a common enough color for moths) on a

white heal-all (an unusual color for a heal-all). Heal-alls are naturally blue or purple, so

this one is a mutation [Figure 1]. Our observer finds this highly improbable scene, this

image seemingly sprung from the palette of Jasper Johns, and ultimately asks, What

but design of darkness to appall could have designed such a thing (13). This is the

poems first attack on the Argument from Design: if the Argument takes itself and the

world seriously, then it can only lead to the conclusion that God is evil and Christian

theology is a sham. An evil design could only indicate an evil designer.

IV. Demolishing the Argument from Design, Version 2

Frost did not stop there. He did not stop the poem or his attack on the Argument

from Design in the reductio ad malumof line 13. The poems final line demolishes not

only the Argument from Design but also its own first attack. If design govern in a thing


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314

so small suggests that the whole drama weve just witnessed might be as misguided as

the original Argument from Design, because thereisno design in a thing so small as

this scene (14). The first attack suggests that natural theology followed to its end could

only conclude with an evil deity; the second attack suggests that a theological mindset

that purports to discover a creator behind creation is wrongheaded no matter how it

imagines that creator. The design perceived there is a construct of the observing mind,not of some malevolent designer. Design does not exist out there; it is only in human

minds and the forms they project on nature. The final line suggests that the outside-in

movement of the poem, from observing D2orderto inferring D1intentionis in

truth always the reverse. Our designing minds impose design on the essential chaos of

the world. What is especially important to see here is that this charge followed through

indicts science as much as it does theology. Pure science claims to discover order in

the world; art to make it. The skepticism of the final line of Design would seem to

suggest that science is really just a deluded form of art.

Frosts use of the sonnet form in this poem would seem particularly apt in light ofthis second critique of the Argument from Design. After all, isnt the sonnet a perfect

example of the artificial order humans lay over the world? If most poets go to the form

to tame the chaos of romantic passion, Frost much more frequently uses the sonnet to

write about nature. Frost published 29 sonnets in his lifetime; all but twoUnhar-

vested, which veers back and forth between pentameter and tetrameter, and Mow-

Fig. 1. Reprinted courtesy of

Carl Farmer.


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315ing, which stands out for being unmetrical employ strict iambic pentameter (see

appendix). Frost was much looser in the rest of his verse, as if in his sonnets he was

submitting himself to the restrictions of the form in order to impose a design on the

worlds disorder. If there is any order in a thing so small as the scene in Design, it

is there because a thing as small as a sonnet governs it all. Nature takes its cues from

art, not art from nature.

This argument should be recognizable. It recalls Eliots description of the mythic

method as a way . . . of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance. Note the verbs.

Joyces method does not discoveran order or shape; it orders, itgivesshape. The focus

for the high modernists was on breaking the old forms and creating new ones more ad-

equate to modernity. Chief among the worn-out forms was metrical verse. Looking back

at the Teens, Pound gave this overthrow pride of place: To break the pentameter, that

was the first heave.12

He told poets to compose in the sequence of a musical phrase,not in the sequence of a metronome.13 The influential critic T. E. Hulme declared,

[R]egular meter . . . is cramping, jangling, meaningless, and out of place.14

Frost, however, should not be included in this camp of idealist iconoclasts. He

lived in England from 191215 and knew Pound and Hulme firsthand. He did not fall

under their spell. On the contrary, he began work on the poem that would become

Design and developed a theory of poetic practice that placed a heavy emphasis on

the significance of sound and meter. Tyler Hoffman suggests that Frosts theorizing

while he was in London was a way to help secure a share of the literary marketplace

for himself, but I would add that it was also a genuine response to and repudiation of

high modernist ideas about meter, matter, and meaning.15

V. Frosts (Generative) Metrics

Most readings of Design stop with Frost the skeptical modernist doubting the

reality of design.16This is a mistake. Frost was no idealist; he believed that order existed

out there, in the natural world, only he found it in an unusual place. Design exists in

nature for Frost, and it exists in phonology.

Rarely taken seriously as a literary theorist, Frost came up with one big idea, de-

veloped in 1913 in London, where every poet seemed to have his own philosophy

of literature, and he trumpeted this idea to anyone who would listen for the rest of

his career. This idea was the concept of the sound of sense, a phenomenon he also

described as sentence sounds, since it was only in sentences that the sound of sense

emerged. The sound of sense, Frost wrote, is the abstract vitality of our speech. It is

pure soundpure form.17The poet, he argued, must be able to perceive this form and

raise it to the level of awareness through his craft. Consider the following comments.

[I]f one is to be a poet he must learn to get cadences by skillfully breaking the sounds ofsense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre. Verse in whichthere is nothing but the beat of the metre furnished by the accents of polysyllabic wordswe call doggerel. Verse is not that. Neither is it the sound of sense alone. It is a resultantfrom these two. There are only two or three metres that are worth anything. (665)


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316 Frosts description of verse matching up meter and speech rhythms, we shall see, bears

great similarity to generative metrics description of metrical forms. Most striking is his

conscious awareness, rather than creative intuition, that what really matters in meter

are the natural stresses of polysyllabic words. Frost also anticipates generative metrics

account of the foundations of meters. Poetic conventions, although the product of

cultural rather than natural evolution, do not, Frost insists, impose order on nature.

They highlight it. Here is Frost again.

Just so many sentence sounds belong to men as just so many vocal runs belong to onekind of bird. We come into the world with them and create none of them . What we feelas creation is only selection and grouping.18(italics mine)

All I care a cent for is to catch sentence tones that havent been brought to book. I dontsay to make them, mind you, but to catch them.No one ever makes them or adds to them.They are always thereliving in the cave of the mouth. They are real things: they werebefore words were. And they are as definitely things as any image of sight. The most cre-ative imagination is only their summoner. But summoning them is not all. They are onlylovely when thrown and drawn and displayed across spaces of the footed line. Everyoneknows that except a free-verster.19 (italics mine)

It is hard to say whether Frosts reference to the cave of the mouth sounds more

like Plato or Chomsky here. I want to suggest that he sounds most like Darwin. Frost

saw himself as more a discoverer like Darwin than a creator like Eliot and Joyce, ascientist as much as an artist. Poetry summons the sounds of sense rather than creat-

ing them. It is to science that we now turn, to generative metrics, in order to see what

it means to drag the accents of language across the meter and to see what happened

when Frost did so in Design.

Generative metrics, first developed by Morris Halle and Samuel J. Keyser and

later modified by Paul Kiparsky and Kristin Hanson, is probably unfamiliar to most

of my readers, despite the fact that it has been around since the mid-Sixties.20 I sug-

gest that the major reasons this linguistic description of meter has not supplantedthe traditional scansion based on description of feet are a lack of familiarity with the

science of linguistics and, more significant, a broader suspicion of all science. While

theories of Universal Grammar and the innate structure of language do remain issues

of debate within linguistics, the mere words universal and innate are enough to

raise the hackles of many English professors and graduate students. The dilemma in

Design is very much the dilemma facing both linguists and literary criticswhat to

make of order in the world and the text? Is it there? And if it is, does it mean anything?

In other words, the status of generative metrics is not unrelated to the current status

of Frost, Design, and metrical verse. A better understanding of generative metrics

will help us read Design; a better reading of Design will help us understand the

significance of generative metrics.

Generative metrics suggests that traditional metrical verse forms might indeed be

much more natural than we have thought them to be. Meter is not, in Wimsatt and


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317Beardsleys phrase, an exercise in abstraction, not completely.21The insights of linguis-

tics, particularly studies of rhythm and phonology, suggest that the iambic pentameter

line, while indubitably the product of cultural history, achieved its near hegemonic

position in English verse from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century because

it was a good fit for the natural structures of English. Hanson claims

[T]he major metrical systems of modern English and the systematic variations in formwithin them . . . can all be understood as stylizations of exactly [the] set of objects and op-erations which constitutes the universal grammar of linguistic rhythm. Specific phenomenawhich are commonly identified with metrical structure . . . all in fact have counterparts inphonological structure itself. Thus, the creation and perception of meter itself as an artisticform has its basis in the natural world, just as architecture does in petrology.22

In other words, formalism and materialism need not be mere metaphors in literarycriticism; linguistics has discovered a great deal about the form poetrys sonic material

naturally takes.

The linguist Bruce Hayes has done invaluable cross-linguistic work on metrical

stress theory that has revealed the correspondences between the natural elements of

phonology and the putatively cultural elements of poetic meter. For example, Hayes

finds that languages that employ stress contain properties similar to metrical verse,

such as rhythmic distribution (Syllables bearing equal levels of stress tend to occur

spaces at roughly equal distances, falling into alternate patterns.) and stress hierarchies([M]ost stress languages have multiple degrees of stress.).23Hayes also suggests that

the grouping we perform in scansion naturally occurs in language use. The work of

turn of the century psychologists on the perception of sound duration and intensity

lead him to propose the Iambic/Trochaic Law:

a. Elements contrasting in intensity naturally form groupings with initial prominenceb. Elements contrasting in duration naturally form groupings with final prominence.

(80)

In other words, in a sequence of alternating loud and soft sounds, the hearer naturally

perceives them in LOUDsoft groupings, a trochaic pattern of initial prominence. When

the alternation is long-short, the grouping becomes iambicshortL-O-N-Gin its

prominence pattern. Finally, linguistics has shown that many languages display a pho-

nological structure that groups syllables into feet. The most amusing, if not the best,

evidence for the existence and significance of phonological feet is John J. McCarthys

account of expletive infixation in English. McCarthy argues that the reason we say

fan-fuckin-tastic rather than fanta-fuckin-stic is that we naturally insert expletivesbetween phonological foot boundaries.24These phonological feet are not equivalent to

metrical feet; their existence however suggests that metrical feet might be, as Hanson

suggests, stylizations of naturally occurring material rather than structures sprung from

the mind of man, untouched by nature. Traditional metrical forms might be much

more the product of nature, while free verse might be the extreme end of cultural


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318 expression. In the light of generative metrics and contaHegel, the poet looks much

more like a painter working with the limitations of pigment or a sculptor with marble

than he does some kind of ethereal being shaping pure spirit.

Generative metrics builds on these and other linguistic insights into the working of

language in order to articulate a description of meter that can capture poets intuitive

knowledge of iambic pentameter and can distinguish lines that conform to that meter

from those that dont. One of the major weaknesses of traditional scansion is that it

cannot really be used to define a meter at all; as Derek Attridge points out, it can scan

any strand of prose as a succession of classical feet without explaining why one line

would be metrical and another, say, this sentence, would not.25Like the speaker in

Design, the analyst using traditional metrics can say what he sees, but he will not be

able to say why it is that way. An adequate analysis of any lines meter entails examin-

ing it against a template and the correspondence rules that govern the mapping of anyline into the template.

The template of iambic pentameter is as follows.

ws ws ws ws ws

This model corresponds to a large degree with traditional descriptions of iambic pen-

tameter. There are ten positions, organized into binary units of feet, and each foot has

a rising pattern, composed of a weak position (w) and a strong one (s). So far we are

not very far from the traditional taTUM taTUM taTUM taTUM taTUM description

of iambic pentameter. The differences appear in the correspondence rules:

1. Each metrical position typically contains one syllable.26Additional rhythmically weaksyllables can be added to the right edge of feet, a phenomenon traditionally know asa feminine ending; these extrametrical syllables most commonly come at the end ofthe line. Weak positions at the left edge of lines or phrases may be left empty, a phe-nomenon known as catalexis.

2. No weak position (w) contains the primary stressed syllable of a polysyllabic, lexical

word, unless that syllable falls line- or phrase-initially.27

What should be noted here it that the rules put no restrictions on strong positions (s),

monosyllabic words, or non-lexical words. Poems conventionally identified as written

in iambic pentameter routinely place unstressed syllables in (s) positions and stressed

ones in (w) positions.

VI. Scanning Design

Here, then, is Design laid out against the template of iambic pentameter:


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319(1) I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,w s w s w s w s w s

(2) On a white heal-all, holding up a mothw s w s w s w s w s

(3) Like a white piece of rigid satin clothw s w s w s w s w s(4) Assorted characters of death and blight

w s w s w s w s w s(5) Mixed ready to begin the morning right,

w s w s w s w s w s(6) Like the ingredients of a witches broth w s w s w s w s w s(7) A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, w s w s w s w s w s

(8) And dead wings carried like a paper kite. w s w s w s w s w s(9) What had that flower to do with being white,

w s w s w s w s w s(10) The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

w s w s w s w s w s(11) What brought the kindred spider to that height,

w s w s w s w s w s(12) Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

w s w s w s w s w s

(13) What but design of darkness to appall? w s w s w s w s w s(14) If design govern in a thing so small.

w s w s w s w s w s

With only one exception, line 14, Design maps cleanly into the template. Each position

contains one syllable, and strongly-stressed syllables of polysyllabic words are in the

(s) position. Lines 6, 7, and 9 could be read as having eleven syllables, and in neither

case could the final, stressed syllables be counted as extrametrical. These lines contain

elisions. The final two syllables of ingredients are elided as one syllable, a perfectlyconventional pronunciation, while the two syllables of flower are elided, so it sounds

like flour, again a pronunciation licensed by ordinary speech. Heal-all in line 10

would appear to violate the second correspondence rule by placing heal in a weak

position, especially since compound words tend to have initial stress (e.g. doghouse,

girlfriend), but as Halle and Keyser have pointed out, Frost often treats compound and

hyphenated words in particular as two monosyllabic words (presuming the compound

is composed of two monosyllables), and Kiparsky has provided a phonological basis

for this practice.28

Heal can be treated as a monosyllabic word and thus presents noproblem for rule two. The only real complication in the poem, the placement of the

word design in line fourteen so that the second, stressed syllable falls in a (w) posi-

tion (contrast it with the placement of the same word in line thirteen), is not so easily

dismissed. It is essential to an interpretation of how the meter of Design contributes

to the poems meaning.


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320 The metrical regularity of the opening lines of the poem is entirely appropriate; if

we can make an equation between nature and the natural properties of English, as I

think we can in Design, then Frost has it that our initial encounter with the poem is

much like the speakers discovery of the natural scene. We find the language in perfect

harmony with meters design. When Design begins to complicate the template of

iambic pentameter with the eleven syllables of line 6, it slightly disturbs this vision and

sound of order, but only to reinstate them more forcefully as the elision of ingredients

brings the line back in line. This elision echoes the blending in the witches broth, in

which discrete components come together in a unity, much as the spider, flower, and

moth have in the poem. The elisions in lines 7 and 9 place flower in a weak position

and a strong position, respectively; a similar phenomenon occurs with heal-all. It is

as if Frost is showing off his ability to arrange language within the constraints of iambic

pentameter.29

In 2, heal-all spans two feet, in 10, only one. The same thing happenswith design in 13 and 14. While Frost might doubt that something steered the spider,

moth, and flower together, he leaves us no doubt as to hisability to steer these assorted

characters into varied but ordered arrangements. It is this ability to sort words that

Frost once described as essential to poets. Our technique becomes as much material

as material itself. . . . In poetry and under emotion every word used is moved a little

or muchmoved from its old place, heightened, made, made new.30

VI. Demolishing the Argument from Design, Version 3

Nowhere in Design is Frosts movement of words more significant than in the

final line. Instead of displaying his ability to work within the constraints of iambic

pentameter, Frost breaks the meter, breaks the poems design, and he does so with the

word design. This is the only line in the poem that cannot be accommodated to the

template. Indeed, it is the only line in any of Frosts pentameter sonnets that cannot

be (see appendix). The first and second syllables of design fall into the strong and

weak position, respectively, which violates the correspondence rule that states that the

most strongly stressed syllable of a polysyllabic lexical word will never fall into a weak

position, save for those exceptions in line- and phrase-initial positions.

If design govern in a thing so small.w s w* s w s w s w s

Once again, form echoes content, as this disruption of order happens in a line that

seems to be questioning whether design does indeed govern in a thing so small as a

spiders meal, a sonnet, or even a single line or word of a poem. Design, it would ap-pear, isnotgoverning the word design itself. The word slips out of the constraints

of iambic pentameter.

I hope it is clear that Frost is making a bit of a joke here, but its not one thats been

heard often. The only critic I know of who has picked up on the meter of the last line

is Reuben Brower, but he sees it as a further reason to doubt the reality of any design


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321at all. This interpretation, I suggest, highlights the limits of foot-based analysis of me-

ter. When it hasnt made readers deaf to the metrical-semantic effect of Frosts final

line, traditional scansion has, as in Browers case, led them to misread the line. For it

is precisely in this jokethat design itself is not subject to the poems designthat

the modernist/idealists argument against design breaks down, and breaks down as a

result of the breakdown of the metrical template of the poem. While the idealist might

claim that this collapse of design only proves his point that minds impose design on

the world, such a claim misses the much more important point that this collapse is

precipitated by the mismatch of the meter and the natural stress of the word design.

Design is naturally accorded sonic prominence in the poem because it is a lexical

word and because its second syllable contains a long vowel sound, but Frost puts that

prominence into tension with the meter. Frosts breaking the meter can only happen

(for both writer and reader) as a result of taking into account aspects of languagetheplacement of stress on certain categories of words and of vowelsthat cannot be willed

by individuals or cultures. Individuals can choose to place extra emphasis on certain

words in their readings of the poem, of course, but this action exploits natural stress

patterns; it doesnt prove their falsehood. What would emphasis mean if there were

not some established pattern for it to be played against? Frosts joke in line 14 is in

part that a break from order is the best proof of orders presence.

Biology and linguistics strike back at both culture and religion here, as nature is

revealed to be designed but not by any designer, not unless God prefers long vowels

and verbs. But Frost isnt done yet. I suggest that Frosts interest in a thing so small as

the stress pattern of a word and his exercise in building up and demolishing arguments

in order to create new ones are analogues to the phenomenon evolutionary biologists

call scaling. Scaling refers to the repetition of the phenomenon of Natural Selection

at each level of scale in the process of evolution, from strands of DNA up to species

and perhaps beyond, if you believe Richard Dawkins argument about memes, all the

way up to culture. What happens with the word design in line 14 recapitulates what

happens in evolution: the appearance of disorder is recuperated into a new system of

order, one with greater complexity. The apparent breakdown of design ends up reveal-ing the insistence of design.

We can find this recuperation of order in two places. Hanson has discovered, in

Donnes verse and Shakespeares dramas, lines that extend the second correspondence

rule, lines that allow stressed syllables to appear in weak positions as long as they are

subordinated to a following stronger stress.32The placement of design next to the

stronger stress of the first syllable govern would be allowed, and it has an interesting

semantic effect. Design is subordinated, appropriately, to govern. The more strongly

stressed word does what it means, a perfect illustration of Frosts definition of poetry:words that have become deeds.33This, then, is one answer to Frosts query: yes, de-

sign does govern in a thing this small because the break with design is only an illusion.

Culturein the form of a sonnetand naturein the sounds of wordsmatch up

quite nicely, perhaps because culture, even in a thing as small as an iambic pentameter

line, is much more the product of nature that weve thought it to be.


15/21


322 We can also place this recuperation at the level of meaning. The disturbance of

order at the metrical level contributes to a greater degree of semantic complexity, as

we recognize that Frost has played a little joke here. It is he who has placed design

out of whack with the template, but he did so intentionally. What looks like a loss of

control over the poems design (D2plan) is in fact the moment in which Frosts design

(D1intention) is most insistent. What is particularly striking about this moment in

the poem is that the sense of the poems meaning is enriched by the perception of a

disturbance of order, in stark contrast to the scenario depicted in the poem, where the

speaker asks what the scene means because it is so well arranged. Earlier I suggested

that one of the main questions asked by Frost in this poem and by many people today

is whether order (D2) implies intention (D1); in Design the collapse of D2 leads

to the inference of D1. We can begin to see in this reversal the difference between

nature and literature. With the natural object, the question is could this concurrencebe meaningful? With a text, the question is could it not?

VIII. The Order and Meaning of Meter

In this final line of the poem, even as the poems structure mimics the operation of

evolution (order rising out of disorder) and employs a meter that Frost understands

more to be given by nature than crafted by humans, Frost makes a sharp distinction

between culture and nature, between text and tree. In this poem (in any poem) we dohave a designer, and it was he, not nature, that placed design next to govern. We

even have a record of his designing intelligence at work in the manuscript evidence of

his revision of In White, a revision that is of course much more interesting in terms

of meter. And as a result, the poem, unlike the spiders repast, definitely has a meaning.

In literature, order does mean meaning; in nature, it does not, since meaning implies

intention, and nature intends nothing.

If nature, and I include meter within its embrace, has any design (D1) it is to achieve

design (D2); this is true at least in the biological realm, where entropy must be kept

at bay. Richard Dawkins has argued that natural selection exerts a braking effect on

evolution. The baseline rate of evolution, in the absence of natural selection, is the

maximum possible rate.34That is synonymous with the mutation rate. Literary forms do

much the same thing; they place a brake on change and in doing so guide it into more

interesting formulations. I can think of no better expression of this paradoxical relation-

ship between constraints and creativity than the mathematician Stanislaw Ulams:

When I was a boy I felt the role of rhyme in poetry was to compel one to find the unobvious

because of the necessity of finding a word which rhymes. This forces novel associationsand almost guarantees deviations from routine chains or trains of thought. It becomesparadoxically a sort of automatic mechanism of originality.35

What Frost realized when he compared free verse to tennis without a net was that

freedom without constraint easily devolves into chaos. Literary forms are not restrictions


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323imposed on language, but structures designed as ways to explore the design space of a

language and to find places undiscovered by earlier writers. In 1950, the geneticist H.

Kalmus described a gene in much the same way that we might describe a literary text:

A gene . . . is a message, which can survive the death of the individual and can thus

be received repeatedly by several organisms of different generations.36

I do not use these genetic/textual metaphors lightly; I would suggest that Design

anticipates in both subject matter and tone this coming together of the biological and

the linguistic that Watson and Cricks discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 enabled.

It was during the Twenties, the decade in which Design was published, that scientists

discovered DNAs composition, but it was Watson and Crick who revealed that the

vast diversity of life could be reduced to chains of just 4 molecules that were figured

as lettersA (adenine), G (guanine), C (cytosine), and T (thymine)and that much

of that diversity came down to, almost literally, spelling, the way the molecules/letterswere arranged. There are two shocking revelations here. First, great complexity arises

from extreme simplicity. Two, nature possesses an order that looks a great deal like

languages. These, I suggest, are exactly the revelations Frost delineates in Design,

and his poem responds to them in much the same way that people did and continue to

do so to Watson and Cricks revelation of the material mechanisms of evolution: awe,

horror, doubt. Just as the perversion of nature in Designthe naturally blue heal-all

that has mutated into a white floweris necessary to establish a new form of order

in the natural scene, so too does the perversion of the meter in the poems final line

introduce a whole new level of design. The meter of Design is not a repudiation

of nature so much as a testimony to it. The poem anticipates the modern synthesis of

evolution, while Frosts theory of meter anticipates modern linguistics. A few decades

later Chomsky and other linguists would confirm Frosts intuition that language was

an aspect of nature.

One of the main problems both religious people and humanists have with evolution

and modern linguistics is its reduction of what seems magical in the worlds beauty,

multiplicity, diversity, and design to the repetition of materials that lack those qualities,

that seem utterly mundane rather than magical. The difficulty generative metrics hashad in gaining a foothold in literature departments can also, in part, be chalked up to

this same resistance. Surely meter cannot be as simple as this; at least those classical

names had an arcane, thaumaturgic charm to them. A commitment to traditional scan-

sion might have something in common with a resistance to or lack of interest in prosody;

they all are suspicious of scientific reductionism. What they miss is that reductionism

does not limit art so much as it reveals the myriad ways it can take shape. Metrics is

descriptive, not prescriptive.

This is not to say that literary interpretation is science or can be reduced to prosody.More than two decades ago, Paul de Man pointed out that literary formalisms error

was to confuse intentional objects with natural ones. Certain entities exist, namely

natural objects, the full meaning of which can be said to be equal to the totality of

their sensory appearances. . . . But even the most purely intuitive consciousness could

never conceive of the significance of an object such as . . . a chair, without including


17/21


324 in the description an allusion to theuseto which it is put.37In other words, intention

always matters if we are interested in an artifacts meaning. An interest in meaning is

an interest in intention. The only correction I would make to de Mans formula is that

natural objects cant be said to have anymeaning, because they possess no intentional

quality.38What they may possess is order (D2), extremely sophisticated order, as in

the scenario described in Design, as in the natural stress properties of languages,

as in iambic pentameter, but that order remains meaningless without intention (D1).

Its worth keeping in mind that DNA is not interpreted; poems are. Confusing D1

with D2 is a temptation that materialism will continue to offer as it grows more and

more powerful in its powers of description (witness Intelligent Design), but it is a

temptation that needs to be resisted in order to see not only, for instance, what meter

is but what it means. Ten years after publishing Design, Frost argued that it was

the coming together, not the confusion, of mind and matter that made poetry alwayssomething more than materialism and a poem always something more than nature.

It is the height of poetry, the height of all thinking, the height of all poetic thinking,

[the] attempt to say matter in terms of spirit and spirit in terms of matter. . . . The only

materialist . . . is the man who gets lost in his material without a gathering metaphor

to throw it into shape and order.39In Design the metaphorof designs power over

disorderlives in the meter.

Appendix: Iambic Pentameter in Frosts Sonnets

Frost published 29 sonnets during his lifetime. I have excluded two of them, Mow-

ing and Unharvested, since they conform only in line number to sonnet form. The

chart below provides the title of each of the remaining 27 sonnets, its page number

in Frost: Collected Poems, Prose and Plays; the number of regular iambic pentameter

lines, the line of line-initial inversions, the number of elisions, the number of extra-

metrical syllables, and the number of lines that cannot be accounted for by these or

the other two commonly allowed exceptions to the templatephrase-initial inversion

and catalexis, neither of which appear in any of Frosts sonnets. What is striking in

this chart is how many of Frosts lines map perfectly into regular iambic pentameter

(84% of lines). More striking yet is the fact that line 14 of Design is the onlyline

Ive found in all of Frosts sonnets that cannot be accounted for by the template and

its correspondence rules.


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325

IntoMyOwn

15

12

2

ADreamPang

25

14

TheVantagePoint

26

13

1

MeetingandPassing

115

11

1

1

1

TheOvenBird

116

12

2

PuttingintheSeed

120

12

1

1

Range-F

inding

122

10

4

OnaTreeFallenacrosstheRoad

220

14

Acceptance

228

10

2

2

OncebythePacific

229

11

1

1

1

TheFlood

233

7

1

440

3

AcquaintedwiththeN

ight

234

14

ASoldier

240

13

1

TheInvestment

242

6

1

7

TheMasterSpeed

273

11

2

1

Design

275

10

3

1

OnaBirdSinginginitsSleep

275

12

2

TheSilkenTent

302

14

NeverAgainWouldBirds

SongBetheSame

308

12

1

1

TimeOut

323

14

Title

Page

Regulariambic

Line-initialinversion

Elision

Extrametrical

Unaccounte

dforby

pentam

eter

inversion

corresponde

ncerules


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326

Title

Page

Regulariambic

Line-initialinversion

Elision

Extrametrical

Unaccounte

dforby

pentam

eter

inversion

corresponde

ncerules

Etherealizing

358

14

WhyWaitforScience

359

14

AnySizeWePlease

359

12

2

ThePlanners

361

8

1

5

NoHolyWarsforThem

361

10

4

BurstingRapture

362

14

TheBrokenDrought

363

14

TOTAL

n/a

317

14

22

24

1


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327Notes1. I want to express my gratitude to Kristin Hanson, the organizers, participants, and respondents

at the Robert Frost Society panel at the 2004 MLA Conference, Morris Halle, and Robert Faggen

for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.

2. Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press,

1977) 243255. This essays takes issue with Poiriers claim that Frost seldom misses a chance to

bring Darwinism into a question (265).

3. T. S. Eliot, Ulysses, Order, and Myth, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New

York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1975) 177.

4. Timothy Steele, Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter(Fayetteville:

University of Arkansas Press, 1990).

5. Robert Faggen, Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press, 1997).

6. There is no better evidence of the persistence of Darwins challenge to traditional ideas about

design than in the lamentable rise of the Intelligent Design movement, basically an updated version

of the Argument from Design, employing bad science and worse analogies.7. Design,n. Oxford English Dictionary, 2NDed. (1989), online edition, 6 July 2005.

8. This second possibility, of a purposeless purposiveness, is the key to Kants account of aesthetics

in the Critique of Judgment.

9. Daniel C. Dennett, Darwins Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life(New York:

Simon and Schuster, 1995) 64.

10. Pinker and co-author Paul Bloom revived interest in language and evolution in the article

Natural language and natural selection, Behavioral and Brain Sciences13.4 (1990) 707727. Doz-

ens of articles have been written in response. Chomskys most considered response was written with

Marc D. Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch in The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, andHow Did It Evolve? Science298 (22 November 2002) 15691579. Essays from both sides take up

the debate anew in Cognition97.2 (September 2005).

11. It is at the very least a happy accident that Frost uses a spider to debunk the Argument from

Design. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Humes mouthpiece Philo refers to a Brah-

min myth that spiders created the universe, in order to expose the silliness of the design argument.

David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and the Posthumous Essays(Indianapolis:

Hackett, 1980) 48

12. Ezra Pound, Canto 81 [1945], The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions,

1998) 538.

13. Ezra Pound, A Retrospect [1913/1918],Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (NewYork: New Directions, 1968) 3.

14. T. E. Hulme, A Lecture on Modern Poetry [c. 1911], Further Speculations, ed. Sam Hynes

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955) 74.

15. Tyler Hoffman, Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry(Hanover: Middlebury College, 2001) 13.

16. See, for example, Randall Jarrells To the Laodiceans (1953) in Robert Frost: A Collection

of Critical Essays, ed. James M. Cox (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1962), 83104; Reuben A.

Brower, The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention(New York: Oxford University Press,

1963); Richard Poiriers Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, and George F. Bagby, Frost and the

Book of Nature (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993). In Robert Frost and the Challenge

of Darwin, Robert Faggen usefully distinguishes between the perception of order and of meaning in

Design: [Important] for Frosts poem is the question Darwin raised of whether a human observer

. . . is in any position to ascribe meaning to what he sees and attempts to make sense of through

analogy (86).

17. Robert Frost, Letter To John Bartlett (4 July 1913), Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays(New

York: Library of America, 1995) 665.

18. Robert Frost, To Sidney Cox (December 1914), Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, 681.

19. Robert Frost, To Walter Pritchard Eaton (18 September 1914), Collected Poems, Prose,

and Plays, 690.


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328 20. Morris Halle and Samuel Keysers Chaucer and the Study of Prosody, College English28

(December 1966): 187219, inaugurated generative metrics. Halle and Keyser revised their ideas

several times over the years. See The iambic pentameter [1972], Essays in Modern Stylistics, ed.

Donald C. Freedman (London and New York: Methuen, 1981) 20624. Paul Kiparsky, in Stress, syntax

and meter,Language51 (1975) 576616, and The rhythmic structure of English verse,Linguistic

Inquiry8 (1977) 189247, made several valuable emendations to Halle and Keysers description. My

own discussion of iambic pentameter draws on all these texts, which should be consulted for their

much more thorough discussion of the linguistic theory and technical aspects of their descriptions of

English rhythmic structures.

21. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstrac-

tion, PMLA74.5 (1959): 58598.

22. Kristin Hanson, An Art that Nature Makes: A Linguistic Perspective in Meter in English,

unpublished manuscript, 67.

23. Bruce Hayes, Metrical Stress Theory: Principles and Case Studies(Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1995) 25.

24. John J. McCarthy, Prosodic Structure and Expletive Infixation, Language 58.3 (1982):574590.

25. Derek Attridge, The Rhythms of English Poetry(London: Longman, 1982) 38.

26. I refer the reader to Kiparsky 1975 and 1977 for a further discussion of the limitations on posi-

tions. For our discussion of Design, we need only work with the syllable restriction, although this is

not the case for much of Frosts poetry, which pushes the correspondence rules to their limit.

27. Lexical words, also known as content words, are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Non-

lexical, or function, words include pronouns, auxiliary verbs, articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and

exclamations.

28. Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser, On Meter in General and on Robert Frosts Loose

Iambics in Particular,Linguistics: In Search of the Human Mind(Tokyo: Kaitakusha, 1999) 14950.On compound words see Kiparsky, The Rhythmic Structure of English Verse, 21214.

29. There may be even more diversity on display than my scansion reveals. Line seven could

be scanned as containing an extrametrical syllable at the end of spider, rather than the elision of

flower.

30. Letter To Sidney Cox, 682.

31. Reuben A. Brower, The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention(New York: Oxford

University Press, 1963).

32. For a more extensive and theoretical discussion of this subordination in Donnes poetry see

Kristin Hansons Nonlexical words in the English iambic pentameter: a study of John Donne, The

Nature of the Word: Essays in Honor of Paul Kiparsky, eds. Kristin Hanson and Sharon Inkelas

(Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming).

33. Some Definitions 701.

34. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker(New York: Norton, 1987) 125.

35. Quoted in Dennett, 223.

36. From A Cybernetic Aspect of Genetics, Journal of Heredity41.1 (1950) 1922; quoted in

Evelyn Fox Keller, Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology(New York: Columbia

University Press, 1995) 79.

37. Paul de Man, Form and Intent in the American New Criticism, Blindness and Insight:

Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1983) 234. It should be acknowledged that de Man went on to alter his thinking on materialism

and meaning a great deal.38. Natural objects can, however, have significance. A cluster of mutating cells in your throat

may be significant, although what that significance might be may be in question, but it cannot pos-

sess meaning.

39. Education be Poetry (1932), Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays7234.

40. Line 5 contains an elision and an extrametrical syllable.

frost design

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