Traveling Through The Dark Theme
Traveling Through the Dark Do you like real life stories with drama and plot twists? Are you tired of sunshine and happy endings? If you said "yes," or even "um, I don't know, I guess," then William Stafford's "Traveling through the Dark" might just be the poem for you. We lost you when we said "poem," right? Wait. Come back. You see, Stafford was an interesting guy. Born in Kansas in 1914, Stafford studied at the University of Kansas and the University of Iowa. Later, he spent many years in Oregon where he taught at Lewis and Clark College, eventually being named Poet Laureate of Oregon in 1975. That makes sense to us; he wrote a lot—seriously. His archived journals show consecutive daily entries totaling around 20,000 pages (and you thought …show more content…
The poem's popularity is due in part to the fact that, like many of his poems, it couples a conversational tone with good old-fashioned story telling. The themes and issues present in his work (humanity and nature, place, family, his Native American heritage) arise from the telling of the tales. The themes are secondary, in a sense, to the stories themselves. Interested yet? I think we've all been there - well, not there in the sense of standing on the side of the road with a dead deer that we must dispose of, but rather in a situation where we are forced to choose between doing what's right and doing what's easy. It might be a situation with a friend or family member or it might be something that will never be known to another living soul. (You accidentally drop your cheeseburger wrapper on the floor. Nobody sees you. Pick it up or move on and let the guy in the funny hat making minimum wage get it later?) At its heart, William Stafford's "Traveling through the Dark" is about that moment when nobody is looking. It is about that moment when we could turn our backs and walk away from our responsibilities without any immediate, personal repercussions (except maybe that pesky Ojigwe |
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