Analysis Of Traveling Through The Dark By William Stafford

In the poem Traveling through the Dark by William Stafford a quick overview is that it gets into a man driving on a curvy road along a mountain side at night, then sees a dead deer on the road and gets out of his car and throws it into the river. The poem itself is exceedingly detailed and finds a way of pulling different emotions out of the reader, while also having different meanings to different people. My secondary source was by Terry Fairchild, who did an analysis on the poem traveling Through the Dark by William Stafford. Terry Fairchild believes that the meaning of the poem is about the wretchedness that accompanies each traveler on the long journey of life toward the inevitability of death. Furthermore, that when an individual encounter a misfortune on the road, we hesitate before …show more content…
Consequently, this is the meaning of the poem as my first reasoning behind it is in the fifth stanza of the poem; it reads “I thought hard for us all my only swerving then pushed her over the edge into the river.” Thus this is a spot on example of how the choices created can directly or indirectly affect someone. In this case by the person that hit deer, directly affected the deer and nature by killing the deer. By leaving the dead deer on the side of the road for the next driver to directly deal with by swerving, stopping and then deciding to push the deer over the bridge into the river. Now the driver that stopped and pushed the deer into the river didn’t directly help anybody except for the next driver to come along Wilson road. The next driver would not need to swerve out-of-the way or stop, pull over and move a deer since the driver before them had already moved the deer off of the road. Therefore, the driver who pushed the deer into the river indirectly helped all future