Stanza 2 Summary

Lines 9-10

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

• We've hit that ever-important part of a sonnet called a "turn." It's not too hard to catch in this poem, because there is a stanza break, but you could've called it as soon as you saw the rhyme scheme. We'll go over all this later, but this is a Petrarchan sonnet, which is usually broken into an eight line chunk (called an "octave") and a six line chunk (called a "sestet"). 
• So what's the shift here? Well, it's pretty obvious, actually. We go from observing the scene with the spider, flower, and moth to wondering about and reflecting on said spider, flower, and moth. So, in these two lines, we get our first question. The speaker wonders what led the flower to be white.
• One more note about line nine. The rhyme scheme so far has been ABBAABBA, but we usually expect a change in that pattern when we hit beginning of the sestet in line nine. That's not happening here, though. Here we get a repeat of that 'A' rhyme. Frost limits his rhyme sounds in the poem to emphasize its formality, its design. Hmm—why does that word sound familiar? He's telling us through these rhymes that he (the godlike poet) is controlling every little detail of his work. (Check out more on this over in "Form and Meter.")
• Line 10 makes things a little murky. The speaker just told us again that this flower is white, and now he tells us it is blue. Well, he probably shifts from talking about this particular flower in line 9 to talking about all heal-all flowers in general. It's kind of like that old Humphrey Bogart line from Casablanca: "of all the heal-alls in all the world, why does this one have to be white?"
• The adjectives "wayside" and "innocent" emphasize this same idea that the flower didn't do anything to make itself white. It's just a heal-all—it's supposed to be blue like all the others, but it isn't. The speaker is proclaiming the heal-all not guilty of turning itself white. So the question remains: who is responsible?

Lines 11-12

What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

• More "-ight" rhymes? It's really getting to be an obsession with this guy. Once again, though, he is showing us the very tight hold that he as a creator has on his creation.
• This second question, which moves from the flower to the spider and the moth, begins to get to the heart of the matter. The previous question was all about the connection and meaning of the coincidence. Why was that particular flower white? Why was it right there at that certain time? But there could be many simple answers to that question. Now we get more complicated.
• Now we are asking "what brought" these characters together. The verb "brought" (and "steered") imply that someone or something must be responsible for this moth massacre.
• Frost is still being nice and ironic. He wants to remind us that the spider (like the flower) is bizarrely white, but he doesn't say it. We know it's not because he has a problem with the word "white"; he's already used that lots of times. No, he says that the spider is a "kindred" spirit with the flower. This disgusting spider that is about to devour the moth is connected, related even, to the pretty flower. 
• The rhyme in line 11 allows us to picture the perspective of the spider. Sitting on top of the flower, the spider was far above the world below ("to that height"). By describing this scene as an elevated place, the poem begins to take on a mythic, epic tone.
• We are given another new picture in line 12. We learned earlier in the poem that this group was "ready to begin the morning right," but we didn't really process what that means. Here we find out that it means that all the craziness went down during the night. During the night, the moth blindly ended up on the flower and was caught by the spider. Now, as the sun rises, the spider is poised to enjoy his hard-earned meal. When we picture this happening at night, we see even more clearly that some supernatural force must have arranged this event—none of the participants could see where they were headed.
• "Thither" is a funny word. It kind of sticks out in this poem. It means "to or toward a certain place," as opposed to "there" which means "at a certain place." It's a small difference and we can probably chalk most of it up to Frost needing to fit his meter, but we could also say that "thither" means that the "steering" was a process—at every step, some force was drawing that moth slowly toward the flower and the spider and, well, toward death.

Lines 13-14

What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

• Frost has a few more tricks saved for us here at the end. The first is the form. We expected this to be a Petrarchan sonnet, which has its turn at line 9 and then begins its resolution. Instead, that's when all the questions start. Then he throws a rhyming couplet at us here at the end, which makes the poem look like a Shakespearean sonnet. We get a second "turn" here, when most sonnets just have the one.
• The second turn starts with an answer to the questions, but in the form of another question. The rhetorical question here says in essence: What made all these white things converge on the same point at the same time? What could have except some sort of evil Designer? In other words, Frost thinks that this whole thing is way too creepy to be coincidence and so it must be some sort of design.
• It's not just some sort of design though—a "design of darkness." The alliteration emphasizes the bad intentions of such a creator. He's right to say we should be appalled. How else are we supposed to think? Some divine force went out of its way to gather up three totally rare living things and then put them together for some kind of horror show. 
• That the designer would be associated with "darkness" adds a little more irony for us as readers, because we've seen the word "white" used five times already. This contrasting imagery leaves us with darkness after all that light.
• The word "appall" can be seen as a pun on the words "a pall," which is the cloth that's spread over a coffin. This designer is death-hungry.
• Punctuation is always fun, isn't it? There's nothing like a good semicolon (if you ask us, anyway). Frost is having a little fun of his own here at the end. We've got that last rhetorical question and it feels like the end of the poem, but then here comes that dash to make us feel a little more suspense before we make it to the last line.
• The final line of the poem complicates the answer the speaker just gave us. Line 13 leaves us appalled at some god who seems more like some mean kindergartner who goes out of his way to pull the wings off of butterflies. It makes us more than a little bit afraid to go on living in such a universe. Line 14 tries (but fails) to cheer us up. Basically, he says: "Look at the bright side: maybe nothing controls our actions and everything that happens to us is completely random." Sheesh. Are we supposed to feel better about that? Yeah, probably not. So we are left at the end of the poem with a healthy sense of ambiguity, of mixed emotions about the possible workings of the universe.