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Apathy to Human Suffering Essay

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The suffering of the world is often captivated in the work of the great poets like Robert Frost and W. H Auden. The similarities between Frost's "Design" and Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" include the belief that the world may be blind to human suffering and to that that causes the suffering. Apathy by the part of the human being is explained either by sheer ignorance of a greater power or by lack of time to consider the existence of such a power that controls the fate of humanity and all that is present in the world.

Robert Frost's "Design" describes plainly a picture that contains the outmost rarities in nature. "I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, / On a white heal-all, holding up a moth / Like a white piece of rigid satin …show more content…

The assorted characters of death are all the associations of funeral rites that are included in these lines. Even the word right, when read in continuation with the next line, turns into its homophone "rite" and that rite into the makings of the witches' broth by using the ingredients, which include the rare spider, flower and the dead wings of the moth.

The design is then most apparent in the next stanza of the poem when Frost questions what has brought the white spider to the top of the rare heal-all flower and what has brought the white moth to the death in the night. "What but design of darkness to appall?-- / If design govern in a thing so small" (Frost 13-14). The whiteness of the elements in a picture that is painted so dark appalls the narrator and poses the question of the fate of the world in the hands of darkness. If a picture that seems so innocent and so white can hold within itself such darkness and design, then how much design do our own lives hold? Frost believes that if darkness can be at work in such a small design, then certainly darkness must be at the reins of our own fate and that if darkness is so evident on a design so white and apparently good, then any design that holds darkness must be infinitely more dark and evil.

W. H. Auden starts "Musee des Beaux Arts" by

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