Traveling Through The Dark Analysis

When it comes to being put in a crisis, people have different mechanisms to cope. Avoiding the reality of an unpleasant situation is a common theme in both William Stafford’s Traveling through the Dark, and Shoshauna Shy’s Bringing My Son to the Police Station to be Fingerprinted. Both poems use literary elements such as diction and imagery to exemplify different ways of coping when put in a high-stress position. Although these two poems share a similar theme, each author uses the literary elements in different ways to convey the same message.
In Traveling through the Dark, Stafford takes the voice of a person driving through a mountain pass during the night when he discovers a dead deer in the middle of the road. The tone of this poem is …show more content…
Similar to Traveling Through the Dark, it is evident that the narrator is very scarred and uncomfortable with the situation she faces. This is exemplified through the way in which she distracts herself. Not once in this poem does the mother mention her son or feeling scared, but rather she describes her outfit in extreme detail. For example, the mother describes her shirt as a “lemon-colored whisper-weight blouse with keyhole closure and [a] sweetheart neckline”. The diction used to describe the mother’s outfit is very extremely detailed, in contrast to the first poem which used words that were brief. Unlike Stafford’s poem which uses cacophonic vocabulary, Shy uses euphonic words such as “sweetheart”, “pastel”, “cool yellow”, and “twill” to lighten the mood of the harsh reality. This creates the effect that the mother is trying to distract herself and sugar coat the situation. Another difference between these two poems is the use of punctuation. Bringing My Son to the Police Station to be Fingerprinted contains absolutely no punctuation, which gives off a frantic tone; whereas in Traveling Through the Dark, where the author used lots of punctuation to create a pausing effect. Suggests that the mother is nervous, tense, and babbling on to avoid thinking about the fact that she is bringing her son to the police station. Similar to Stafford’s poem which takes place on a mountain road in the middle of the night, the setting of Shy’s poem is in in a dark and grim place; a police station. Lastly, every time that reality starts to hit the mother and her thoughts are not one-hundred percent positive, a new stanza begins. A moment of hesitation was also present in the other poem, “my only swerving”, which further exemplifies that the mother is trying to avoid facing the fact that her son is being