Encountering a dead deer on the road is not an unusual occurrence; oncoming drivers see the roadblock and handle the situation accordingly. Some drivers will swerve to avoid the animal – it's safe to say that most drivers will swerve – but a select group of drivers will stop to move the deer off the road. An example of a driver in that select group can be found in William Stafford's poem "Travelling through the Dark". After moving the deer off the road, this particular driver must choose between the decision that his heart recognizes as morally right and the decision that his mind recognizes as logically correct. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The driver, who is also the speaker of this poem, encounters the deer in the first two lines of the poem: “Traveling through the dark I found a deer / dead on the side of the Wilson River road” (lines 1 -2). Even if he didn't cause the animal's death, he knows what to do with its carcass: “It's usually better to roll them in the canyon” (line 3). , the driver is providing past knowledge about this type of accident; it is not the first time the driver has had to do something like this (line 3). It is in the following verse that the driver justifies his act of rolling the deer into the canyon: “that road is narrow; swerving could cause more deaths” (line 4). It is clear that the driver considers the life of a human being more important than the body of an animal; of this already deceased animal will ensure that no man will lose his life either. His intentions towards the animal are clear and his actions have been justified. In the first line of the second stanza, the driver prepares for his upcoming action: “By the glare of the taillight I stumbled backwards from the car” (line 5). His feelings towards the animal emerge in the following lines: “and stood beside the pile, a doe, a recent murder; / she had already become stiff, almost cold" (vv. 6-7). By using the word “heap” to describe the dead doe, a connotation of rubbish was achieved (line 6). The driver describes the dead animal as one would describe a pile of rubbish; in doing so, he remains impersonal, keeping his emotions out of the situation at hand. His detachment from the current situation is evident in the first half of line eight: “I dragged her away.” This half-line reinforces the connotation of junk through the driver's action; he “dragged” the doe off the street as if dragging a bag of trash into the dumpster (line 8). It is in the second half of line eight that the driver's apathy falters; it is here that the driver notices something in the doe that had previously gone unnoticed by him, something unforgettable: “she had a big belly”. This final half of line eight marks the end of the driver's detachment from his actions; now the driver's emotions are involved. The driver could have ignored his new discovery and continued with his logical action of rolling the doe into the canyon. But his curiosity was piqued, so he went looking for the answer to why the doe's belly was large: “My fingers touching her side told me the reason - / her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting” (lines 9-10). The driver is no more impersonal than the doe; he no longer sees it as trash. He didn't call it a doe: a pile or a mass; she immediately called him “her fawn” (line 10). A juxtaposition between the fawn and its mother occurs after line ten. In the seventh line, the driver describes the doe as stiff, “already cold”;”.