In the fifth line of the poem “Design”, an invisible hand enters. The characters are “mixed” like ingredients in an evil potion. Some force doing the mixing is behind the scenes. The characters themselves are innocent enough, but when put together, their whiteness and shroud-like appearance are overpowering. There is something diabolical about the spider’s feast.
The “morning right” echoes the word rite, a ritual – in this case, apparently, a black mass or a Withces Sabbath. The simile in line seven is more ambiguous and more difficult to describe. The foam is white, frothy, and delicate, something found in a stream in the woods or on a beach after a wave recedes. However, in the natural world, foam can also be ugly: foam from a polluted stream or the mouth of a rabid dog. The dualism in nature, its beauty and its horror, is there in that one simile.
So far, the poem has portrayed a small, frozen scene, with the dimpled killer holding his victim as innocently as a child holds a kite. Frost has already hinted that nature may be, as Radcliffe Squires suggests, “nothing but an ash-white plain without love, faith, or hope, where ignorant appetites chance upon each other.” Now, in the last six lines of the sonnet, Frost comes out and makes his point directly.
What else could bind these things stark and pale as death “but the design of darkness to horrify?” the question is clearly rhetorical; we’re meant to reply, “Yeah, it looks like there’s evil design at work here!” I take the penultimate line to mean: “What except a design so dark and sinister that it horrifies us?” “Pass”, by the way, is the second play on words in the poem: it sounds like a mortuary cloth or a shroud. Directed carries the suggestion of a steering wheel or rudder that some pilot had to control. Like the word brought, it implies that some unseen force traced the paths of the spider, the healer, and the moth, so that they would arrive together.
