Sacrifice In William E. Stafford's Traveling Through The Dark

1612 Words4 Pages

Poems are very interesting things. They can tell stories, show character, give life to the text, and some of them even have deeper meanings than what’s on the surface. Poems are written in specific ways, the author knows what he or she is doing and there is usually always a reason an author uses the words he or she does. Traveling through the Dark by William E. Stafford is a great example of this because on the surface it may look like just a man finding a deer and then rolling it over the canyon, but what does the poem say with each line or each word? Traveling through the Dark is a poem that could have a few meanings, but the meaning of sacrifice for others and the disregard humans have for nature really stand out. Traveling through the Dark starts off with a very simple and seemingly innocent line, the speaker talks about how he or she has found a deer while traveling through the dark. The line has a sort of calmness to it, a sense of joy even, because the speaker only says that he or she has …show more content…

The speaker knows what must be done and they are contemplating whether they want to leave the doe there for the sake of the fawn, or roll it off into the canyon to save more people’s lives. The author also uses “swerving” in this line in reference to an earlier line in the poem. It’s their only “swerving”, their only hesitation of the situation before they do what needs to be done. Which leads to the last line of the poem, “then pushed her over the edge into the river.” The last line of the poem has the speaker pushing the doe into the canyon, even though the speaker knows that the fawn will die in the process. This could show a few things. It could show that sometimes you need to sacrifice one life for many others, or it could simply be that humans can dictate the life and death of nature with no

Open Document