Traveling Through The Dark

(1/2)
The speaker’s dilemma is the decision he has to make as to whether or not to push the deer off the side of the road and into the river. His options are as narrow as the road he travels. In the first stanza, he already knows that he needs to clear the road “to swerve might make more dead.” However, in the final lines of the poem he says that he “thought hard for us all – my only swerving.” He still contemplates what he wants to do because the deer’s baby was still alive inside its womb. The fact the speaker used ‘us all’ can be questioned because we’re not sure whom he’s directing it to. He could be making it seem like he was making a decision for everyone, not just the animals, the wilderness ‘listening’, or the person reading the poem. In the end he actually ends up pushing the dead pregnant doe into the river, which a deeper meaning of river ironically enough, means the fluidity of life.

The speaker of the poem is obviously emotional and in-touch with his feelings. When he finds the deer on the side of the road, he makes the mature choice of pushing it off the road because it had the possibility of hurting and killing others. The fact that he at least contemplated not pushing the deer off into the river says a lot. The deer was dead, but the baby was still alive. He didn’t know what the right decision was so he made the adult one to save the lives he knew he could. The right choice.

Stafford, in the poem, uses syntax and different connotations when he creates imagery. For instance, when he writes, “I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red,” the syntax could mean that not only was the exhaust turning red, but so was he. Connotations linked to red could be like embarrassment, anger, blood, violence, and danger… So maybe he was in a state of anger because he was the one who found the deer so he had to make the decision on what to do with it. Another use of imagery is when he said, “By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car.” Before death it’s said that you see a light. This could figuratively be the deer’s child’s light. The mother, hit by a previous car, had seen her light – and now that the man shows up and pushes her (with the child inside) off the road, it’ll probably die soon too. 

3. Stafford uses near rhymes, half rhymes, and off rhymes that rely much on assonance or consonance.
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