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What's a point of comparison and contrast in Frost's use of style, imagery, or sound in "Design" and "Nothing Gold Can Stay"?
Quick answer:
"Design" is a Petrarchan sonnet, in iambic pentameter, with a turn after line 8 and a propositional approach to the topic, resolved in the sestet. "Nothing Gold Can Stay" is not written in iambic pentameter nor does it have fourteen lines. It is written in trimeter couplets, with a final line that illustrates increased disorder in the pattern, missing a syllable.
"Nothing Gold Can Stay" is not actually a sonnet. However, it is similar in theme to "Design," which is written in a modified version of the Petrarchan sonnet form.
In both poems, Frost is meditating upon the transient nature of life. The flower does not last; its "gold" is maintained for only an hour. The brevity of the poem is itself symbolic of this theme: not only does it consist of only eight lines, but the lines themselves are in iambic trimeter, with only three iambs (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one) per line. The poem is over almost before we know it.
"Design," on the other hand, has the usual 14 lines of a sonnet. The rhyme scheme is somewhat unusual: abba abba acaacc. Thus, the octet follows the Petrarchan scheme, but the "a" rhyme is carried over into the sestet. The three elements of...
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the poem which Frost uses to demonstrate how ephemeral the natural world is are a spider, a moth, and a flower. These images are linked together, just as Frost links together the octet and sestet of the poem with his rhymes. A central idea, apart from the fact that life and beauty are transitory, is arguably that death and beauty are typically juxtaposed in nature. We can see this as Frost describes how the spider has destroyed the moth and is holding it up like a "paper kite."
It is a pessimistic view expressed in the final couplet, which in the sonnet form is like a summary of the entire poem's thought:
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.
Notice also that the pattern of unstressed-stressed syllables is disrupted in the last line. This disruption is a technique used by poets to highlight meaning and to cause a line to stand out from its context. In some ways, this is the opposite of the approach of the closing line of "Nothing Gold Will Stay," in which the first line of the poem is simply repeated, as if to emphasize the ordinary, obvious nature of the message that is imparted. But the themes of these two poems are essentially the same.
The Petrarchan, or Italian Sonnet consists of two stanzas of 8 and 6 lines respectively, so Design can be considered as such. Nothing Gold Can Stay is indeed an octet, composed simply of eight lines, but apparently earlier versions had several more lines (see links.) Beyond the structure of these two pieces, one comparison point could be that they both discuss issues of transformation -- life to death, youth to wisdom, through the metaphor of nature in each of these pieces, namely, a flower in Design and sunlight in Nothing Gold Can Stay.