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Nature And Technology In William Stafford's Traveling Through The Dark

734 Words3 Pages

“Dead Dear”
William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark” focus is the between nature and technology. Stafford expresses intersection between nature and technology without expressing his true opinion. Stafford offers the readers to reflect carefully with him about the consequences of the world that individuals are generating.
In the first few lines, of the opening stanza of the poem, they set the true scene of the setting and narrator’s tone for the poem. The speaker communicates how he was driving at night and came across a dead deer in the road. He is specific the setting when he says “on the edge of the Wilson River road” so we can imagine the actual scene of the setting (lines 1-2).
In the second stanza, the narrator describes his how …show more content…

Lines 13 through 16 suggests technology advancements being the cause of this scene. The car is portrayed as man. The heart in relation to an engine, “engine is a heart that is purring under the hood and it is waiting for the speaker’s return” (lines 13-14). The unborn deer’s heart is pounding, waiting to die inside it’s mothers dead body, feeling helpless of its predetermined fate. The narrator hears “the wilderness listen” (line 16).
The final stanza is different than the previous stanzas because it ends like a sonnet. The narrator does not give us images of his thoughts. The narrator says “thought hard for us all” before he pushed the deer over the canyon edge, suggests the internal conflict of nature and technology (line 17). Stafford suggest we think as mankind of the price of advancing technology in this stanza.
William Stafford’s “Travelling through the Dark” is a very sad and depressing poem. Stafford stresses no idea of getting rid of technology. The narrator does not express that humans are evil and that nature if more important than human life. The narrator takes responsibility and pushes the deer aside to possible save more humans from this dead deer’s body in the future. Stafford suggests we ponder at times if technology has more benefits for man than nature

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