Traveling through the Dark

Although William Stafford’s poem appears to be dominated by the gruesome discovery of the dead pregnant deer, the dominant presence in the poem is the speaker. Thus, while the poem is concerned with how humanity often disastrously interacts with nature, it is also about the role of the poet. Stafford frequently acknowledged that the poem’s subject matter is drawn from personal experience: He had come upon a dead pregnant doe driving along Wilson River Road and had opted to clear the highway. The speaker/poet explores the impact of blind chance and a darkening world where accountability and responsibility are at best ironic, at worst a dangerous illusion.

Stafford plays on traditional assumptions about the figure of the poet. In sharing his encounter with the deer, Stafford does not offer wisdom: The experience does not end with the clarity of a tidy epiphany that he might offer to his reader, such as would be featured in an insightful volta, for example. Rather, the poet merely observes the speaker pondering the dilemma of the unborn fawn and coming to understand he really has no decision. The poet leaves the speaker helpless, confused, and vulnerable; his ultimate choice is to leave the makeshift community he has created with the doe and rejoin humanity. The poet’s observation does not become revelation; his role is to share and feel deeply but never understand entirely.

The opening stanza offers the poet-speaker at his surest. The stanza gives a detailed and matter-of-fact account of the discovery of the dead deer, featuring precise markers of time, the name of the road, and previous pragmatic behavior. Finding a carcass on the narrow and twisting river road is acknowledged as a normal situation that has a standard solution: “It is usually best to roll them into the canyon” (Line 3), the speaker points out, sounding in control and unperturbed. Here, logic is on the side of saving humans from danger: To prevent additional accidents, the carcass needs to be moved off the road.

In the first line of Stanza 2, however, the poem pivots on an unexpected verb. The speaker, who has pulled over, “stumbles” (Line 5) to the rear of the car. Although the rest of the stanza recounts the poet’s seemingly routine action to clear the road, the “stumble” introduces the possibility that the speaker has lost his footing, that he is moving with unearned confidence. The stanza continues destabilizing the speaker’s world. What he had considered a “heap” (Line 6), or an undifferentiated, inanimate mass, now gains identity and delineation, as he realizes that he is dealing with “a doe, a recent killing” (Line 5). The language here transforms the carcass into a body, and the death into something approaching a homicide investigation, complete with a time of death—the humans the speaker is hoping to protect by moving the deer are now culprits. The stanza closes with another indication of this transition. The dead deer is “large in the belly” (Line 8). It is an odd observation that begins the speaker’s education into how little he controls.

Stanza 3 moves the speaker into the dilemma of how to handle the unexpected. The dead doe is carrying a fawn, and that fawn has survived the hit-and-run. The speaker’s earlier confidence now becomes uncertainty. Life and death are no longer tidy oppositions. What had appeared to be roadkill contains a paradox that echoes physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment about a cat in a potential kill box, both dead and alive at the same time. The fawn is living and breathing now, but no longer able to be born without assistance; it has the capacity to emerge and grow, and is also doomed to die inside its mother if not freed. For the first time in the poem, the speaker doesn’t know what to do: “Beside that mountain road I hesitated” (Line 12).

In Stanza 4, the speaker still assumes that he is in the middle of a choice—a fallacy, as we will soon learn. However, his true helplessness is juxtaposed with the growing animation and anthropomorphization around him. Unlike the dying fawn, the car comes to life, taking on the characteristics of a sentient being: It “aimed ahead its lowered parking lights” (Line 13) and “purred” (Line 14), its “warm exhaust turning red” (Line 14). Because the speaker’s main desire is to help other motorists at the expense of the deer, his car is imbued with the qualities that should rightfully belong to the fawn. However, even the car is horrified by the moment—its “lowered” headlights approximate eyes looking down in dismay, while the fumes of exhaust are “turning red” as though to mark the deer’s blood. The car’s communion with the deer and her fawn unite the odd combination of figures into “our group” (Line 16). At that moment, the speaker feels “the wilderness listen” (Line 16), reasserting itself as also sentient and waiting for him to act.

The closing two lines subvert the convention of a couplet offering poetic resolution—for example, in Shakespearean sonnets. Here, the speaker gains no insight and can only follow his original plan, disposing of the carcass by rolling it down into the river. However, because of the preceding stanzas, the meaning and emotional resonance of this action has dramatically changed. By exposing the casual cruelty with which the creation of roads and fast-moving vehicles affects the non-human residents of the wilderness, the poem posits that making the road safe for other humans is morally suspect. Readers are left asking whether the speaker has done the right thing, whether the compassion he feels for fellow drivers could be better directed.