Analysis Of The Poem 'Traveling Through The Dark'

“Traveling Through The Dark” is filled with drama and plot twists. It is a poem that really does convey a story in a candid, straight-forward way. I am not even a big poetry but I found that this poem really drew me in and kept me there. This poem is about that split second when nobody is watching. The instant where we could turn our backs and walk away from our duties without any direct, personal consequences (except the sense of right and wrong). We get to put ourselves in the speaker 's shoes and ask ourselves what we would do. The action all takes place on a mountain road at night. When a driver stops to pull a dead deer out of the road, he bumps into something unanticipated that makes him contemplate some big problems about mortality and nature along the road of life. In this poem Stafford uses the title, subtle false rhyme scheme techniques, and setting elements to give the poem a feeling of gloominess. As I read this poem it sparked up some old feelings I had when I was at a crossroad on whether or not to have an abortion. Stafford gives us a pretty straight forward title. The title sets the scene both accurately and …show more content…
Stafford switches from four-line stanzas to a little couplet which gives us a feeling of something missing (reflecting on the loss of the dawn). The end words do not exactly rhyme in the poem instead, Stafford makes the lines tie together and not tie together at the same time. For example, the words don 't exactly rhyme, but they share sounds and, like road and dead (both end in “ad”), killing and belly, (both contain two l’s) essentially appear similar in ways that make an indirect link between the words. Stafford’s use of a subtle false rhyme technique gave the poem an informal tone. Rhyming words would have made the poem to formal, neat, and cheerful which is the exact opposite of death. Death is disorderly, careless, and