Free Verse
While this one falls under the heading of free verse there are some structural and metrical elements that make the poem feel very ordered.
One of the first things that jumps out about this poem is that it's organized into four, nice, neat four-line stanzas, with a tidy little couplet at the end.
The four-line stanzas resemble elegiac stanzas (specifically, these are four-line stanzas of iambic pentameter with alternate rhyming lines). The lines aren't in iambic pentameter, and the end words don't exactly rhyme, but there is enough similarity to make us think of an elegy (a poem that reflects on mournful topics, especially death). That all checks out, right? After all, this poem is about the death of the doe and the fawn. And that switch from the four line stanzas to the final couplet gives us the sense of something missing or incomplete—perhaps mirroring the loss of the doe and the fawn.
You might also have noticed something going on with the end words in the second and fourth lines of stanzas 1-4 and both lines of the final couplet. It's that rhyme that isn't really rhyme we mentioned before. What you are noticing is called false, or slant, rhyme. The words contain similar sounds, but are not true or full rhymes. Take a look at these end words side by side: "road" and "dead," "killing" and "belly," "waiting" and "hesitated," "engine" and "listen," "swerving" and "river."
Can you hear those similar sounds? The words don't exactly rhyme, but they share sounds and, in some cases like "road" and "dead," "killing" and "belly," actually look similar in ways that make a subtle connection between the words.
Sometimes very strong, full rhymes can make a poem feel formal or too singsong-y. By using this very subtle false rhyme technique here, Stafford is able to keep a conversational, informal tone. At the same time, the lines feel very connected. When we read this poem, it really feels like every line, every word is exactly where it should be. That feeling comes, in part, from the connection between those false-rhymed end words.
So what's up with this technique? Why would Stafford link, but not link, his lines together through this approach? Well, if you ask us (and thanks oodles for doing that, by the way), we'd tell you that this makes perfect sense in a poem that's trying to cope with the idea of death. Think about it: death is pretty much the ultimate in disharmony—pretty and exact end rhymes just wouldn't cut it. However, our speaker is thinking "hard for us all," and clearing a path (literally and figuratively) that can help us through the darkness. He may not be able to take our hand every step of the way, but these loosely-connected lines feel like we do maintain some guiding connection to him through these lines. The false, or slant, rhymes remind us that at least we've got that going for us. Yay?