Taylor Sjoberg Blog #7

This week we read a numerous amount of poems but one in particular stood out to me. The poem I enjoyed the most was Traveling Through the Dark Night by Stafford. This poem is about a man who is driving through the wilderness on this one single road and sees a dead dear in the night. He passes it and then stops to get out to move it off the road so it doesn’t affect any other drivers. Before moving it he realizes the mother is pregnant and the baby is still alive and he is forced to make the decision to save the baby or push the whole body over the edge of the mountain. Unfortunately he ended up pushing the deer over the edge. There are a lot of clues in the poem that show man vs. wild and how we focus more on civilization rather than wilderness. One line stated that he pulled over to move deer off the road so no other people would get into an accident. He didn’t pull over to save the life of the animal he was worried about civilization. Also he left his engine running when he got out of the car, which suggests he was in a hurry, and never had intentions of saving the animal his intentions were just to toss it over the side. Overall this poem has a big theme of civilization vs. nature and I found it very interesting.