In the Dark In the poem, “Traveling through the Dark” by William Stafford, the first stanza begins like a story about what happened one night while driving. Stafford clearly draws a picture of where he is, “Wilson River Road” and what he finds, “a deer dead”. He continues on to inform the reader of what you usually do when you find a dead deer on the side of this road. Stafford tells us it is “…showed first 75 words of 783 total…

…showed last 75 words of 783 total…situation he is in now. At the end of the poem Stafford pushes the deer over into the canyon which is the irony of the situation. For a short while I expected he wouldn’t push the deer over, but I was not surprised in the end when I found out he does because the whole time I knew in the back of my mind that Stafford was going to push the deer over anyway