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.
Themes
Humanity’s Place in Nature
The poem’s conflict adds complexity to the environmentalist theme of uncaring and selfish humans invading the wilderness and creating meaningless death. The dilemma William Stafford poses to his speaker is less about the direct 20th-century problem of people aggressively, indifferently intruding farther into nature and devastating its gentle, delicate balance, and more about the indirect ways that human self-preservation and our tendency to think our species removed from all the others affects our interactions with the natural world.
To explore this nuanced version of environmentalism, Stafford shifts the poem’s characters away from the primary act of violence. The speaker is not responsible for the roadkill. However, the concepts of responsibility and accountability are still front and center. While we do not know the circumstances surrounding the doe’s death—the how and why of that driver’s decision remain a mystery—the speaker is nevertheless quickly implicated in the loss of life. His initial response, to clear the road to protect future drivers, appears at first to be logical and compassionate—he doesn’t have to stop but chooses to perform an unpleasant task to safeguard other people from the potential hazard on a dangerous road curve.
However, while the poem seems to be about the resulting choice to either help or ignore the surviving but unborn fawn, it is really about the speaker’s choice of community. In the moments he spends examining his alternatives, his “only swerving” (Line 17) juxtaposes two possible sets of beings: “our group” (Line 16), meaning the bond created between the dead doe, her fawn, the purring car, and the speaker in the middle of the wilderness; and “us all” (Line 17), meaning the speaker’s fellow people. In the end, the poem sidesteps the easy condemnation of aggressive invasion and decimation of nature to consider our more indirect kinds of harm—insensitivity, alienation, and the assumption that we are above other creatures.
The Resilience of Nature
The emotional core of the poem is the question the speaker considers “hard for all of us” (Line 17), before removing the dead deer from the narrow road. When he determines that the doe is pregnant and, given the warmth of her belly, that the fawn has most likely survived the hit-and-run, he “stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red” (Line 15), feeling “the wilderness listen” (Line 16) around him. While the poem doesn’t spell out what the speaker is pondering in that moment, it is clear from context that he is evaluating whether he has the capability to somehow help the unborn fawn. The burden is symbolic: The fawn has the potential to live a full life—a life that encapsulates the possible future thriving of the natural world. Should the speaker do whatever he can to ensure that this world survives, making a decision that will hamper his short-term comfort and possibly endanger him as he struggles by the side of a road where other drivers might hit him? Or should he chose his own safety and that of fellow humans in the short term, while ignoring the future to come?
That question moves toward the pessimistic realization that the speaker is helpless in the face of the death of the fawn and the doe, seemingly dooming nature as a whole. But read within the larger canon of Stafford’s nature poems and his celebration of a Transcendentalist vision of nature’s free-whirling vastness, the poem also affirms nature’s energy and reassuring surplus—although the doe is dead, the surrounding boundless wilderness is alive and aware. The sheer fact that killing the doe did not also destroy its offspring, leaving its potentiality intact, points to the idea that we can still participate in the richness of our surroundings.
Within this tempered but not completely absent optimism, Stafford puts the man, his car, and the dead doe in a grander perspective. Consider, the poem reminds the reader, that there is time to undergird the enduring ecosystem, though we have destroyed many parts of its vastness.
The Reality of Death
The poem brings together two philosophies critical to understanding Stafford’s complex vision of nature: first, his resilient Transcendentalist faith in the abiding energy of nature, and second, his deep faith in the Christian vision of linear time and the inevitability of death.
If the wilderness confirms the vast durability of nature, then the chilling reality of the dead doe—“the heap” (Line 6), left so rudely and publicly on the road—reminds the speaker and the poem’s readers that nature’s richness is not infinite. The direct descriptions of the deer’s body—including sensory language that puts readers into the moment, feeling that the carcass is “stiffened already, almost cold” (Line 7)—make the poem an elegy, a contemplation of death. The speaker’s realization that within the doe is a life doomed not to survive makes the inevitability of death all the more oppressive.
The speaker pauses a moment to take in the cold reality that all animal life inevitably surrenders. In an echo of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” a poem to which Stafford’s is often compared, the speaker works to shake off these grim thoughts. His car is still running, an artificially living thing that “aimed” and “purred” (Lines 13-14) in ways that the doe no longer can. Rather than dwelling on its demise, he can refocus on being the Good Samaritan who has cleared the road by dispatching a hazard. The poem’s concluding couplet clearly indicates the speaker’s return to his regular life—to the responsibilities of the human who most identifies with the needs of fellow humans. Much like Frost’s lonesome traveler, Stafford’s speaker has miles to go.
