Literary Analysis of The Poem "Traveling Through The Dark"

In his blank verse poem “Traveling through the Dark”, by William Stafford, the author thinks about the intersection of technology and Nature, not suggesting any judgment, but inviting us to think with him about the effects of the kind of world that is being creating.

The first stanza has matter-of-fact tone that sets the scene in the poem. The speaker tells us he saw a dead deer while driving somewhere at night. The speaker was very specific about where he was, not any abstract place, but “on the edge of the Wilson River road.”. Those who are familiar with this place start to imagine it, but those who have never been there get a sense of a non fictional story. There is a running stream nearby, then in the next two lines he advances the setting by providing more information about the road he is on. The road is narrow and lies along a canyon where the river runs. He doesn’t directly describe this, however, he reveals it while remarking on how to take care of the problem the deer’s body presents. The deer's body might cause other drivers to swerve to avoid it and may crash. The speaker then rolls the deer's body over. The speaker has donor this more than once. It seems mundane to him, almost clinical.

In the second stanza, the speaker moves into action. The speaker stops his car and “stumbles” back to it. It’s dark, hard to see, the shoulder of the road narrow and rough. The speaker left the car running. The lights on to perform the task and to hopefully warn any other cars that might be on the road. He sees that although she is stiffening and “almost cold,” there is evidence that the body was hit recently. The man begins dragging her further from the road to the canyon’s edge. Noting that her belly is larger than normal. The tone remains distanced. The speaker seems thus far entirely unaffected by this “heap” that he must dispose of.

Note that part of this tone is created by the sounds of the words the poet chooses. There are many hard consonants in these stanzas – d’s, hard c’s, b’s slow the reading and make it seem a bit cold: deer, dead, best, canyon, glow, car, doe, cold, dragged, belly, stumbled, road, stiffened, already, found. There are several short clauses in the two stanzas, creating the clipped tone of a documentary: “That road is narrow”; “I dragged her off.” The setting and the language intrigue us, but we are wondering by now why the story is important, and the “big belly” of the doe finally suggests to us the direction the poem will take.

The third stanza confirms our guess: the speaker touches the doe’s side and feels the warmth of the unborn fawn who will now inevitably die with its mother. The tone warms as the speaker contemplates the fawn “waiting, / alive, still, never to be born.” (Note too how the sounds help to create this new warmth: more l’s, w’s, r’s, and s’s – side, reason, warm, fawn, waiting, alive, still, hesitated.) For the first time we sense the speaker’s engagement; he is no longer a detached narrator but part of a situation bigger than the one he had anticipated. Till now, he’s been a man going about a mundane task to complete it as soon as possible – but the discovery of the waiting, doomed life within the dead body of the doe causes him to hesitate as he stands at the side of this dangerous mountain road.

The fourth stanza creates a tableau: the car, the man, the deer momentarily frozen in the glow of the taillights. The first three lines focus on the car: the parking lights – lowered to avoid blinding any approaching motorist – are aimed ahead; its engine, “under the hood,” is “purring” steadily. These images suggest a great deal: the forward movement of technology, yet the car is also personified – it has a heart, it seems, under the hood, purring, waiting his return, as the unborn fawn waits, its heart beating steadily, in the deadening womb of its mother. But the speaker is standing behind the car, not in the white light of the headlights, but in the “glare” of the taillights turning the polluting mist of the exhaust a dull red and casting their glow over the entire scene. Here then is the “group”: a man, a dead deer, a waiting fawn, a purring car. As he stands he hears “the wilderness listen.” One cannot, of course, hear someone (or something) listen. But when silence surrounds us, we may have the feeling of some unseen presence listening, waiting to hear what we will do or say. Here, the “wilderness” listens: Nature – the river, the canyon, the mountain and all they contain – anticipates his reaction.

The final stanza is a couplet, emphasizing its content by its differing form, ending the poem similarly to a sonnet and probably intended to evoke that similarity. It does not tell us what the speaker thought as he stood hesitating in that listening silence. He only tells us “I thought hard for us all” before completing his task by pushing the deer over the canyon edge into the river. But the poem suggests that his thoughts must have to do with the tension between man’s technology and Nature. The deer – and her fawn, and many other deer – would be alive if man had not made the cars and the roads where such accidents happen, if he had not encroached on the wilderness with his speed and powerful mechanisms. The convenience of our technology comes with a cost – but a cost we often do not consider.

Yet Stafford does not seem to be saying “down with technology!” The speaker makes no judgment that man is evil; his momentary contemplation does not make him think or act as though Nature is more important than mankind. He pushes the deer into the canyon, sad perhaps for the fawn which will die, but accepting the responsibility to make sure no person dies because of the deer. The deer has died because of man; but we do not let a man die because of the deer. The speaker’s “only swerving” is not one of indecision but only of thought, and Stafford invites us to think with him, to at least consider the cost, perhaps to wonder if the benefits of our technology are always worth that cost, perhaps suggesting we should give more thought to that cost before we have to make the inevitable choice of man over Nature.