Traveling Through The Dark isle of lewis camping Analysis William Stafford

However, the whole dilemma becomes even more serious when upon “touching her side” , the narrator finds out that she is pregnant. The doe is dead, but “her side warm” , and her fawn is “waiting” to be born, which is not going to happen. Even though the narrator “hesitated” saying that the baby deer is “never to be born” prepares the reader to the realization of the man’s decision. Still, the hesitation, even if it has not resulted in the deer’s favor, plays a rather significant role in the metaphorical dimension. This instance portrays how people frequently linger “Beside that … road” and weigh all the pros and cons of some situations before making the final, most important, conclusion. In the last line of the first stanza, the bitter realization of what is to be done is given some explanation.

‘Traveling through the Dark’ alludes to the nature of life and death and how choices surrounding both states of being are made. One is likely to walk away from this poem, contemplating what they would’ve done in the speaker’s situation. Then after the deer is dumped into the river, with the baby still in it we are forced to begin to think about why the speaker would just kill an innocent baby.

• In the beginning, the poet is moved deeply by the fawn but at the end, we find he ends the life of the fawn by pushing its mother down into the river.
• I think it is about the narrator being forced to choose between life and death.
• The swerving is a momentary change of thought but in the end the driver does the one thing he knew he had to do from the moment he stopped for that deer.
• It is knowledge that if the deer is not moved others will be moved from the road to and with that knowledge a decision is made and the consequential death of the unborn doe occurs.
• William Bradford’s “Traveling through the Dark” seems to present its setting in the very title, but further analysis of the poem allows discerning that the “dark” has two shades of meaning.

If he had been able to get the baby out of the womb would it have made any difference? Could the child have made it in the wild with no mother to guide it? While I do believe that the speaker does the right thing in getting rid of the deer so that no one else will be troubled by it, I think that he gets rid of it for the wrong reason. Although the poem actually states I thought hard for us all we really dont get the feeling that he has thought about the consequences for everyone, even though he tries to convince himself that he has. All he really wants to do is get back to the safety and warmth of his car and go back to not thinking about things while just doing the routine thing. River in literature by contribution of psychoanalysis has following meanings.

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Further Analysis Stanza By Stanza

By using blank verse but adding specific rhythmical effects, the poet portrays how abrupt, disorganized, but still eventually right the course of people’s lives are. The darkness, which is pictured both in the title and throughout the poem, envelops the narrator’s way home as well as his thoughts. The use of metaphors, personification, and alliteration help to visualize the core conflicts isle of lewis camping the speaker encounters. The setting and imagery of the poem encourage the readers to ponder over crucial choices they sometimes have to make in life. Traveling Through The Dark is a deceptively simple poem which records the actions of a driver who finds a deer, killed on the road by a previous car. The deer turns out to be pregnant and this fact plays on the mind of the helper, who wants to keep the road safe yet cannot stop thinking about the fawn, still warm inside the mother.

The car becomes a being, with red lights and exhaust, like a demonic breath, the driver turning red as he decides what to do. But he has already decided that the deer will end up in the canyon as is the local tradition. His way of looking at life may be the easiest way of all ways to look at life; you do what everyone else does unless it is a matter of importance. The problem with this is how do you know when something is a matter of importance?

However, William Stafford criticizes human behavior, which is the source of problems of nature. People are selfish and cruel towards the animals; they are careless to environmental problems. Poet happens to encounter a dead doe on the mid road at the dense forest by the river side in the night time. He was supposed to shift the dead animal into the canyon and while he tends to do the same he notices a baby inside the warm belly which was tending to kiss the Earth. But the condition for it was complicated since natural birth was damn impossible and the facilities over there were numberless.

Travelling through the dark is really the point of this entire poem as he is saying that life is like travelling through the dark. We never know when death is coming or what obstacles may be in our future. The main symbols in the poem are darkness and the road.

The poem is called “Travelling through the dark” He makes beutiful parallels throughout the poem and this is the first. He is not only saying that he is travelling through the dark in his car but he is comparing the fawn in the mother’s stomach to this aswell. It is just a passenger in the mothers womb and it is travelling through the dark.

Instead of just finding a dead deer, the narrator has now actually done the killing. It is an incredible idea that confounds the previous ideas on the actual meaning of the poem. The poem’s theme of nature versus technology disintegrates at this outlook. The speaker describes this horrible event and makes the reader aware of the idea of the poem, which means human and technology harmful influence, which causes damage to wild nature. The pregnant female deer demonstrates the most vulnerable side of nature.