18 pages • 36 minutes read
William StaffordTraveling through the Dark
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1962A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Unborn Doe
The unborn doe, “alive, still, never to be born” (Line 11), symbolizes at once the power and resilience of nature, and its helplessness and its vulnerability. On the one hand, the doe has survived the accident that killed its mother. Despite the brutal intrusion of humanity into the wilderness in the shape of the car and the hit-and-run that killed the mother, the fawn lies in the warmth of its mother’s belly, its potential still active. As the speaker contemplates the dead deer, the fawn is evidence of the power of nature—its strength in the face of humanity’s clumsy and often deadly reach.
The doe is a paradoxical symbol, however. In the line that centers the word “still,” there is grim wordplay. Still can mean “yet”—as in, the fawn is living, as far as the present moment goes. Its energy keeps the broad curve of the doe’s belly warm despite the settling in of rigor mortis. However, “still” also means no longer moving; in combination with the last word of the line, “stillborn” describes what the fawn will soon become—an offspring that fails to emerge alive from its mother’s body. This twin potential, to thrive or to be destroyed, symbolizes in microcosm the choice the speaker and all humans face in regard to the wilderness we decimate.
The Dark
The speaker begins by locating the poem in a symbolic landscape: He is “[t]raveling through the dark” (Line 1). On a literal level, it is night. William Stafford based the poem on a real-life experience; he was driving through Oregon on his way home to Portland and was negotiating the twisting road along the Wilson River at nighttime. Figuratively, the dark symbolizes the larger cultural landscape in which humanity struggles to understand the delicate dynamics of the global ecosystem and reckon with its destruction of other species.
Stafford examines humanity’s place in a complex natural world in which each element depends on the cooperation of the other elements. In that dark space, the speaker finds little comfort. His discovery of the roadkill leads to a terrible choice: Either way, he must make “more dead” (Line 4)—either by shoving the dead doe off the road and thus dooming its living fawn, or leaving it on the road as a potentially fatal hazard for other drivers. The speaker must consider which ecosystem to become a part of: the group formed by the beings on the side of the road, or fellow humans.
That decision, with its moral dimensions and its suggestion of humanity’s destruction of nature one piece at a time, symbolizes a darkness greater than the Oregon night and gives the poem its gentle pessimism.
The Wilson River
In the end, the speaker decides to clear the narrow road by heaving the dead doe and living fawn into the river below. The Wilson River thus symbolizes the willingness to sweep under the rug hard evidence of humanity’s mishandling of nature. A lifelong committed environmentalist, Stafford depicts people as at once responsible for their destructive ways and helpless to do anything other than continue on the path they’ve set out on: Once the road by the river has been constructed, all people can do is continue to clear it for more cars, regardless of the direct or indirect damage to nature.
In the night, the black reaches of the Wilson River are a useful place for disposing of the body, which is no longer visible once it clears the small pool of light created by the car’s tail and headlights. However, the reality is that out of sight, out of mind is a terrible mantra—as soon as day breaks, the doe and its now-dead fawn will be obvious. While the carcass will no longer be obstructing the paved roadway, it will be obstructing the natural path of the river water; drivers won’t have to navigate around it, but river life will.
More than 60 years after the poem’s publication, the global climate change crisis upholds Stafford’s vision of humanity’s unwillingness to accept responsibility for its actions. Sweep enough deer off the road, the poem argues, and eventually you will have to answer for the pileup.
