This morning I saw a bloodred spider in my bathroom. It was crawling perilously along the jam of a drawer, and death was a second away if I shut it and crushed it. I'm getting over my childhood (and childlike) fear of spiders, but if literature has taught me anything it's that a bloodred spider or similar insect is a bad omen in my home. I slammed the drawer.

Design by Robert Frost

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.


I like how he uses the sonnet form--something most often used to invoke powerful emotion and apostrophe--to take revenge on a Christian believe in benevolence to design beauty. Whiteness being some archaic colour of innocence means that if God were true and real and in fact all-powerful then the spider and flower would be dark, say, bloodred.