Atrocities in Staffords Traveling Through the Dark Essay -- Traveling

Atrocities in Staffords Traveling Through the Dark   Is a drive just a drive, or is it a metaphor that imparts predilection for livings fragility while simultaneously lamenting mans inability to appropriately confront, or understand, death? William Staffords Traveling Through the Dark illustrates the mechanisms by which seemingly workaday events become probes into the mystery and ambiguity of the human condition.   The poems situation is simple, a alone(predicate) traveler driving along a desolate canyon street spots a felled cervid the traveler, desiring neither to hit the deer, nor by swerve to avoid it, hurtle his car over the canyon precipice, stops his fomite and proceeds to push the fallen animal over the canyon face, into the river below. As the driver struggles to displace the cold, stiff deer corpse he senses excitement emanating from its abdomen, its an unborn fawn. Realizing that life remains in the body he had fabricated dead, the traveler hesitates. Fina lly, he pushes the deer, one dead and the other not in time alive, off the road and into the chasm.   While the poems situation is simple, its theme is not. Stafford appears to be intimating that life is precious and fragile however, nothing so clearly discloses these attributes of life as confrontation with death. Furthermore, the very confrontations that engender appreciation of lifes delicacies force action-all to frequently cauterise action.   Hence, the poems tone contains elements of remorse as well as impassivity. The travelers detached exposition of the mother, ...a doe, a recent killing / she had stiffened already, almost cold (6-7), and the wistful full stop with which he depicts her unborn offspring, ...her fawn lay there waiting... ...iver. Because the deers killer was a man behind the wheel of an automobile the traveler shares some relation back with him. The travelers anguish, his bleeding, is the realization that he is implicated in the murder of the d eer through his association to the actual killer.   If expanded further, this metaphor can be applied to the entire human experience. All humanity is like a traveler driving through the dark. At varying junctions in our experiences we are, inevitably, two the discoverers and perpetrators of atrocities the confusion surrounding our responses to theses junctions is the darkness we travel through.   Stafford ends the poem after the traveler pushes the deer into the canyons depths. We dont need to be told he returns to his car and drives on, we know it intrinsically, its what apiece of us would have done, what each of us must do.