Traveling through the Dark

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1962

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

William Stafford’s poem is made up of four stanzas of four lines each, each line approximately the same length, and a closing couplet that offers, much like couplets in traditional sonnets, a resolution to the poem’s dilemma.

The poem is written in free verse, or without a regular meter or rhyme scheme. Here, each line maintains its own meter, loosely eight beats per line that mimic the rhythms of conversational speech.

Instead of metric regularity, the poem uses consonance, or the repetition of consonant sounds, to create a musical sonic effect. The first two lines of the poem feature a recurring “d” sound: “[T]hrough the dark I found a deer / dead on the edge of the Wilson River road” (Lines 1-2). The repetition makes readers linger on the word “dead” and the alliterative phrase “deer dead”—the crux of the poem’s moral conundrum.

Stafford also juxtaposes unlike sounds to suggest the speaker’s moral hesitancy. For instance in the phrase “alive, still” (Line 11), the sounds dramatize the conflict between life and death. “Alive,” with its open-mouth vowels and fully voiced consonant “v” contrasts with the soft “s” and the unvoiced “t” of “still.” The dichotomy enhances the fact that the speaker is poised either to save or doom the fawn.

Speaker

Stafford’s poetry often reflects his own experiences, elevating everyday events to the grandeur of poetry and treating them with nuance. Many of his poems are in the first person, making reading about the experiences of his speaker-poet like paging through his diary. Stafford’s typical speaker does not feel like a character through which to filter his experiences; rather, the voice is genial and inviting, and seemingly reflects Stafford’s own personality. This creates intimacy between the reader and Stafford that is in keeping with his belief that poetry must offer clear communication, building closeness that reveals that anyone’s life can be invested with the importance and gravitas of a poem.

Personification

Drawing on his admiration for the kinetics of Transcendentalist Walt Whitman (See: Background), who perceived the material cosmos as alive with spiritual energy, Stafford fills “Traveling Through the Dark” with personification—a literary device in which inanimate objects are imbued with animate characteristics as a way to charge the inanimate with life.

For instance, the car “aimed” its headlight and “purred” (Lines 13-14)—actions that give it the life that has been taken from the no longer living animal the speaker encounters. The unborn fawn is “waiting” to be born, endowing an animal with the human quality of anticipation. And just at the moment the speaker decides what must be done with the dead deer, the wilderness all around him “listen[s]” (Line 16), the very trees seeming to wait for his decision.

Personification dramatizes the poet’s belief that humanity and the natural world are similarly sapient; it also shows that we have moved away from imbuing fellow creatures with the same level of anthropomorphic magic that we now reserve for man-made objects. In the poem, animate and inanimate, human and creature, organic and machine, make up, in fact, a single unit: “our group” (Line 16).