Symbolism In Travelling Through The Dark By William Stafford

The poem travelling through the dark was written by William Stafford. Poet Stafford was born on Hutchinson, Kansas on January 17th 199 while he died on Oregon, on August 28, 1993. He received a BA and an MA from the University of Kansas at Lawrence and, in 1954, a PhD from the University of Iowa. (poets.org) Stafford in the poem makes the expresses his sad emotion on the deer that was lying on the street with her dead fawn. He also presents the tension the nature and the technology. In relation to the topic of the poem it is the modern poem because it talks about the cars. The poem is internal because it is the poet himself who is facing the situation and he is the one who is describing the situation.
The poem doesn’t have any words that has …show more content…
First symbol that is used in the poem it “the dark”. Dark usually have a negative connotation about something bad or evil. In the poem the dark is included with the word travelling so the poet is trying to convey that when we travel through the dark there is something ominous. Similarly, the word “road” is another symbol used in the poem. The road in the poem literally means the road in the jungle or in the mountains. But, the word road in the poem tries to convey the meaning of path in our life. The word narrow road in the poem means to convey the meaning that the path of the life is hard. We all have to go through the series of calamitous situation and are lot of different options that we can take in the hazardous situation. So the road tries to convey that our life journey is really hard and it is really hard to figure out and choose the right path in our …show more content…
There are variety of the word count in different sentence of the poem but, the shortest line is with six words and the longest line contains twelve words. The poem is divided into five stanzas. Among those five stanzas first four have four lines each and the last one has only two lines. This is significant because poet describes the different actions in the different stanza of the poem. In the first stanza he describes the setting of the poem that is dark and mentions the fact that he saw the dead deer in the road. In the second stanza he gets out of his car to take a look at the deer. In the third stanza he found out that the deer is pregnant and it’s not the only one dead but its fawn is dead with it too. In the fourth stanza he shows the irony between the living mechanical car and the dead deer. In the last stanza he describes his action of pushing the deer into the river. He delivers the sense that it was one of the hard decision for him to push the deer in the river. The last stanza is unique compared to others in the poem. It only has two lines while others have four lines each. It is because the poet tries to express that his action of pushing the deer in the river was very hard decision and was really