Traveling in the Dark: William Stafford (questions)

1. The color of the "warm exhaust turning red" (line: 15) symbolizes the recent death. Also it symbolizes his love and caring he feels in the time of pushing her over. The hood purring shows the silence of the wilderness in this moment of passion. I get the strange feeling of warmth from this poem. When I think of the exhast and the engine of a car I think of it being hot and warming. Warm is supposed to mean good though. Maybe the author is trying to show the good out of this situation.

2. The speaker's tone seems calm and warm. He makes it seem as if he has done this before and it is a normal, everyday thing to ppush a dead deer over the road. He seems very confident with his decission, like the deer itself would want him to do it.

3. The last stanza having only two lines seems to wake the speaker out of his daydream of telling his story. It concludes the poem in a subtle way with deep thought. What does he mean by "my only swerving" (line:17)? Does he mean that this was the only time he swerved, or is it that he had swerved once then killed another deer, pressing him to go slow and look now.

4. The poems title is "Traveling through the dark." This seems apropriate being that the speaker has his lights on and there seems to be no other cars on the road at this time. He has a time of traveling to get this deer into the darkness so this may play into it. The speaker seems to have "thought hard for us all" by acctually stopping to get that deer out of the road. He could have passed it up and let someone else swerve to hit another one, but he didn't. He thought about our lives, including the deer.

5. This could be specified as didactic. It is somewhat teaching you not to just pass up the dead on a road. Feel its pain. Feel what it would feel when someone swerves and hits another deer because of them.