Images of wind and rivers, of going with rather than against their motions, embody the value he places on passive receptiveness.

The antithesis to this receptive, passive stance Stafford locates in its exact opposite: war. War is active, aggressive, and most often an attempt to manipulate the world rather than understand it. Fears of war, nuclear holocaust, and encroaching destruction of the wilderness appear throughout his poems. In “Cover Up” (1991), he writes: “don’t worry about the mountains;/ and some trees even might survive, looking/ over a shoulder from places too cold for us.” Because Stafford sees all life as having spirit—“there is a spirit abiding in everything”—destruction of the natural world, through war or development, appears as the most grotesque consequence of having failed to learn how to live harmoniously.

Still, Stafford’s poetry as a whole is hopeful, playful, generous, sympathetic, and filled with a kind of wisdom rarely achieved and, even more rarely, so beautifully expressed. His style is colloquial but tight and quirky, full of sudden turns. His poems are always accessible and, indeed, inviting to the reader; he wishes to be understood. Clearly, too, Stafford’s faith in the creative process has led him to many discoveries, and he is not reluctant to share those discoveries, or even, at times, to offer friendly advice. In “Freedom” (1973), he writes: “If you are oppressed, wake up about/ four in the morning: most places,/ you can usually be free some of the time/ if you wake up before other people.” In “The Little Ways That Encourage Good Fortune” (1973), he warns: “If you have things right in your life/ but do not know why,/ you are just lucky, and you will not move/ in the little ways that encourage good fortune.” Readers of Stafford will find themselves fortunate to follow the path of a poet who learned so well how to live.

“Traveling Through the Dark”

First published: 1962 (collected in Traveling Through the Dark, 1962)

Type of work: Poem

The poet finds a dead deer on a mountain road and faces a painful dilemma.

“Traveling Through the Dark” is Stafford’s most famous, most often anthologized poem. It is somewhat atypical, as it tells a story about a real experience in a fairly straightforward way. Yet in its underlying concern with nature—in this case, a deer found dead in the road—with humans’ invasion of the wilderness, and with the individual’s responsibility to do what is right “for us all,” the poem reveals some of Stafford’s abiding themes.

“Traveling Through the Dark” achieves its power by subtly blending the symbolic and the real and by seeing underneath the surface event to its larger consequences. The title suggests not so much a drive on a mountain road as a spiritual journey through unknown territory. At the same time, something quite real has happened. Stafford has “found a deer/ dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.” That he names the road specifically gives the poem the feel of authentic experience.

Roads and paths, for Stafford, often symbolize the ongoing process of life, and here he must confront a dilemma that involves his deepest relation to all of life. At first, he realizes that he should roll the deer into the canyon to protect other drivers who come after him; he notes that “to swerve might make more dead.” When he examines the deer, however, he discovers that it is a pregnant doe; its fawn is still alive, waiting to be born. Suddenly, the choices are much more complicated. Should he try to save the fawn, or do as he originally intended?

He must act quickly, but the poem does allow the suspense to build. Where other writers might have treated this crisis sentimentally, Stafford shifts the focus from what he is feeling to a vivid, pulsing description of the scene:

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;under the hood purred the steady engine.I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning  red;around our group I could hear the wilderness  listen.

The car lights point the way ahead, and the engine purrs as if it too were alive, waiting. The warm exhaust fumes “turning red” in the glow of the taillights suggest the blood that must now be flowing on the ground and cast a ghastly coloring over the whole scene. Most important, the poet can “hear the wilderness listen.” To hear something listen is to listen carefully indeed. That it is the wilderness that is listening attributes an awareness of nature that is characteristic of Stafford’s poetry; it also implies that his decision matters not only to the fawn and to the speaker but also to the whole of life, which waits to see what he will do.

The decision is not easy, nor does the speaker say how he arrives at it. He simply says that he “thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,/ then pushed her over the edge into the river.” “For us all” here can mean the poet, the doe, the fawn, the wilderness, and, by implication, all living things. His thought swerves, as a car would have done, but he acts as he feels he must. By deliberately leaving out the precise nature of that thought, Stafford forces the reader to imagine the difficulty of the choice and thus puts the reader, retrospectively, into his dilemma.

“Things I Learned Last Week”

First published: 1982 (collected in A Glass Face in the Rain: New Poems, 1982)

Type of work: Poem

A collection of random observations leads to an ominous reminder of death.

“Things I Learned Last Week” is a wonderfully odd, apparently random poem that illustrates a central element of Stafford’s poetics. The poem at first seems remarkably offhand and unambitious, a simple disconnected listing of tidbits Stafford happened across during the week. Such an approach, lacking any grand intentions, reveals Stafford’s willingness to follow his impulses wherever they might lead him.

The first two stanzas record observations that one would not usually expect to find in a poem: “Ants, when they meet each other,/ usually pass on the right,” and “Sometimes you can open a sticky/ door with your elbow.” Hardly stunning discoveries, these facts amuse partly because Stafford has put them in the poem. They are some of the things he learned last week and so must be included. Perhaps they imply that everyone learns something by paying attention to the small, daily events that are usually ignored.

The next stanza humorously depicts a “man in Boston” who “has dedicated himself/ to telling about injustice.” It seems that the poem is about to take a more serious turn, but Stafford adds an element of irony to his description of the man by saying: “For three thousand dollars he will/ come to your town and tell you about it.” Stafford gently obliterates the man’s dedication simply by mentioning his lecture fees. The man has obviously dedicated himself to making a profit from injustice, making a career out of it, and so he himself commits a kind of injustice and a glaring hypocrisy. There is injustice in the world, no doubt, but Stafford sees that its opponents often participate in it, much as opponents of war often resort to violent protests.

Stafford has also learned some things about writers during the week, and he treats them, too, with a bemused irony. “Yeats, Pound, and Eliot saw art as/ growing from other art. They studied that.” Here, Stafford implicitly rejects the poetics of three towering figures of modern literature. Because they believed that art grew from other art, they studied art, forming a closed, elitist circle and cutting themselves off from the soil of daily experience—the soil out of which Stafford’s own poem grows.

The final two stanzas introduce a darker subject—death—but it is treated playfully at first. “If I ever die, I’d like it to be/ in the evening. That way, I’ll have/ all the dark to go with me, and no one/ will see how I begin to hobble along.” The use of the conditional “if” in reference to the one certain fact of existence, the preference for evening, and the hint of embarrassment at being seen hobbling along all make death seem hardly more than a clumsy problem of decorum. The final stanza, however, pushes the poem to a larger consciousness of death that is no joke:

In The Pentagon one person’s job is totake pins out towns, hills, and fields,and then save the pins for later.

It is one of the grim absurdities of modern life that one person’s job would consist of taking pins, indicating targets, out of maps. That he saves the pins “for later” is an ominous reminder that there will be more wars, that death on a large scale will come again, without regard to the poet’s preference for evening.

The poem begun so lightly thus leads to the inescapable knowledge of humanity’s destructive power and the constant readiness for war that hovers over human existence. Everything that precedes the final stanza, however humorous, takes on a poignancy when seen in the light of the threat of nuclear annihilation. A poem that seems pointless and harmless at first thus sharpens itself at the end by reminding the reader of the dark current running beneath daily life.

“It’s All Right”

First published: 1991 (collected in My Name Is William Tell, 1992)

Type of work: Poem

Stafford sees that the natural world can console people for the difficulties they encounter in the social world.

“It’s All Right” is one of Stafford’s most charming poems. It is an example of his characteristic impulse to include the reader in the collaborative process of the poem’s meaning. The poem’s language and tone are simple and reassuring; it is as if the reader is being cheered up by an old friend or given some helpful counsel by a wise grandfather.

The poem speaks to the reader directly, as many Stafford poems do, addressing the reader as “you” throughout. Stafford is concerned not only with the events of his own life but with the events of others’ lives as well. The experiences he describes are ones that anyone can recognize. “Someone you trusted has treated you bad./ Someone has used you to vent their ill temper.” Surely, all readers encountered such treatment. Yet Stafford knows that these difficulties are an inevitable consequence of social life: “Did you expect anything different?”

Stafford goes on to list, with sympathetic understanding, the failures and frustrations that, expected or not, can wear people down. “Your work—better than some others’—has languished,/ neglected. Or a job you tried was too hard,/ and you failed. Maybe weather or bad luck/ spoiled what you did.” Stafford takes care to imagine types of disappointments in work that could apply to a wide variety of readers, from writers, who often feel unfairly overlooked, to farmers, whose best efforts may be ruined by the caprice of the weather.

Stafford knows, too, that personal relationships often cause pain. “That grudge, held against you/ for years after you patched up, has flared,/ and you’ve lost a friend for a time. Things/ at home aren’t so good.” In only ten lines, the poem has covered many of the sources of unhappiness that people experience in their daily encounters with the world, and the cumulative weight of the poem has become indeed heavy.

Having reached its low point, however, the poem suddenly turns. “But just when the worst bears down/ you find a pretty bubble in your soup at noon,/ and outside at work a bird says, ’Hi!’/ Slowly the sun creeps along the floor; it is coming your way. It touches your shoe.” After such large disappointments, what can bring back happiness are the small things not usually noticed—“a pretty bubble”—and the steady, dependable forces of nature. If the social world is inevitably the source of frustration and disillusionment, the poem seems to say, the natural world is just as surely the source of contentment, consolation, and beauty.