[Download] "Playing Through the Dark: "Blindness" As a Vehicle for Transcendence in Selected Sports Poems." by Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Playing Through the Dark: "Blindness" As a Vehicle for Transcendence in Selected Sports Poems.
- Author : Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature
- Release Date : January 22, 2005
- Genre: Reference,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 343 KB
Description
After Frost's "Stopping By Woods...," William Stafford's "Traveling Through the Dark" is probably the most anthologized "wayfarer" poem in American literature. In "Traveling," the speaker stops in the dead of night on a narrow road above a canyon to examine the carcass of a doe that has been killed by a car. Touching the doe's side he discovers that she is carrying a fawn that is still alive in her womb. Musing on the deer's death and the possibility that its body might cause another motorist to swerve and perhaps plummet into the canyon, considering the prospect of abandoning the unborn fawn, and weighing his options and responsibility, the isolated speaker becomes one with his surroundings. With his vision impaired by darkness, he listens so intently that he can as a consequence "hear the wilderness listen." He thinks "hard for us all," and then rolls the carcass bearing the unborn fawn over the canyon's edge into the river far below (Stories 61). Stafford's poem tempts the reader to allegorize the incident, to turn the deer, the car and the canyon into symbols for larger entities. I would argue, however, that Stafford, like Frost, is in this poem more synechdochist than symbolist, that to deny the incident's reality and concreteness is to deny the significance of the vision it generates. Stafford's traveler is not Everyman floundering through life's mysteries. He is one man whose experience is like those the rest of us undergo, and the vision he experiences is available to the rest of us if conditions are conducive to such a vision, and if we take full advantage of those conditions by a passionate focusing of our attention and energy on the moment. The darkness the speaker experiences limits normal perceptions, but "calls his listening out" ("Listening," Stories 33), as Stafford says in another poem. This listening, ironically, allows him in Wordsworth's phrase, to "see into the life of things."