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 has 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?

If design govern in a thing so small.

Frost uses the colour white to provide an ironic contrast throughout the poem. He first uses white to describe the spider in the first line, “I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,” (Frost).

At the end of the first stanza, the contrast between the colour white and the obvious horror of the scene is apparent. In one line, Frost uses the words “death and blight” and “witches broth”, but in the next line, he refers to the spider as a “snow-drop”, which suggests purity, and to the moth’s wings as “a paper kite”, which suggests innocence. This contrast is another indication of irony.

In the second stanza, the narrator questions the coincidence of how the white spider, the white heal-all, and the white moth came to be. He illustrates how “Fair is foul and foul is fair”, because although it is foul, or bad, that the spider killed the moth, it is fair because the spider needed to eat the moth in order to survive. The narrator also does not blame the “innocent heal-all” (Frost) because although it is foul that the heal-all attracted the moth, it is fair because the heal-all needs to produce nectar. It is evident that the narrator does not blame any of the three characters for this tragedy because he refe

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