From the very onset, the poet unites the antithetical images of death and dawn to establish the fragility of human life. Dawn is usually associated with beginnings and hope, yet it is at this hour that the poem’s speaker witnesses not one but two deaths. This shows that the values humans assign to certain times and seasons—dawn, morning, spring, summer—are arbitrary. Death does not care for such values and strikes at random. 

Another way in which the poet shows the impermanence of life is through depicting how people’s carefully-laid plans can be upset. The traveler sets out in the morning presumably to get an early start on the day as well as to beat traffic. He is shown to be almost euphoric with purpose; yet, in the final stanza, he comes across his doppelgänger, whose purpose has been dismantled by death.

The speaker refers to the victim of the car accident as “brother”: he sees himself in the victim and realizes he could have been in the place of the rider. Possibly the rider too made careful plans for travel but was cut short by destiny.

The interplay between humanity and nature in the poem is complex and cannot be reduced to a man-versus-nature binary. Humans are, after all, a part of the natural world; yet progress and egotism compel them to act in a way that sets them apart from the organic order.

In the poem’s opening stanza, the traveler is exhorted to wipe his feet against “the dog-nose wetness of earth.” The earth is associated with moisture (wetness) and comfort (dog-nose). It is against this familiar comfort that the traveler sets his feet, the action of opposition and dominance against the soil, which is symbolic of nature.

If the traveler has nature under his feet in the first stanza, in the second, the natural world gains an upper hand, the sunrise “quench[ing]” his headlights. “Quench” means both to satiate and to extinguish, and thus, nature has the power to quell human inventions (the car’s lights). As the images of the feet against the wet earth and the sunrise drowning the car’s lights show, humanity and nature exist in an uneasy embrace.

Despite the tension between the natural and human worlds, the speaker asks the traveler to watch the “faint brush pricklings in the sky,” the coming of light depicted as a painting being formed. This image, with its reference to impressionistic art, is critical to understanding the poem’s stance on the relationship between nature and people. Humans are moved to inspire and create by nature itself. Thus, human inventiveness need not always be in opposition to nature. 

It is only when egotism prevails that human inventiveness becomes inimical to nature and to itself. Thus, when the driver is compelled to keep speeding even after the augury of the cockerel’s death, the speaker notes grimly that nothing can slow down “the wrathful wings of man’s Progression.” The ironic statement of course means the exact opposite: it is only man who thinks the wings of his progression are unbeatable.

In the next stanza, the image of the dead driver shows that humanity can unwittingly create its own destruction. Significantly, the driver is described as killed by the hug of “your invention.” The driver has been killed not by an act of nature, but in a car crash created by humans. In the end, human egotism harms nature by harming humanity.