In the poem "Traveling Through the Dark “ a man is driving through the dark in his car and sees a dead deer on the road than realizes that the deer is pregnant also. So than he gets confused, and doesn’t know what to do, either keep driving on or call someone, or to push it off the road.
So, than after viewing this dead deer he decide to push this stiffed up deer dead, off the road. As he goes up to push it, he could feel the baby deer inside of the dead mothers stomach, and so I guess that’s when he was shocked that the baby was still alive. In my own eyes I can see the driver being angry, not at himself but the community, the public society. But at the end of the poem he stops talking about the dead pregnant mother dear and, talks about his car vehicle, and as its warm and alive and how the dead deer is cold dead.
So the driver thinks hard and finds a solution to his problem and, the only right thing to do is to drag the helpless deer into the river. Inside of him he feels as if it’s wrong to swerve away from problems of others. And he feels guilty and wants to do the right thing and all but he can’t because the life of a new generation of nature itself. Instead of worrying about the problem, you have to accept the things how they are. Or the poet may be making a point that the nature lovers are responsible for the dead animal. In this poem Stafford presents a great tension between two realities, two lessons of life and death. And that is responsibility that we