Stanza 2 Summary

Lines 5-8

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

• The speaker gets out of the car and walks around the back to see the dead deer. He notes that it is a female ("a doe") and that it is "a recent killing." Then, the speaker drags the deer away from the road, noting that her belly is "large."
• One thing about our boy William, he's kind of sneaky. When it seems like his poem is just telling us the facts in the simplest possible terms, there is often another layer of information hiding right there in plain sight. 
• For example, let's take a look at the imagery and word choice in this stanza.
• Let's start with, "By glow of the tail-light." What color are tail-lights? (Anyone? Bueller?) That's right—usually red. And we know that it is nighttime (we are traveling through "the dark"). So, we have our speaker, alone on a rural, mountain road standing over a dead deer in a kind of eerie red glow from the tail-lights. Creepy. If this were a horror flick, now would be a good time to cover your eyes—things are feeling pretty ominous. Stafford uses that eerie red light to set the tone.
• The speaker tells us that the dead deer is, "a recent killing." Here again, Stafford is giving us some basic, narrative information, but his word choice is significant. He doesn't say, she was "killed recently" or that she "had died recently." Stafford's decision to use "killing" makes the death more active and immediate. Someone did this. There was a killing.
• By using "killing" Stafford makes the event more immediate and also emphasizes the fact that someone else caused this death.
• He's not just saying things live and things die. He wants us to remember that, sometimes, death is something we (humans) cause; killing is something we do.
• The word "heap" seems to emphasize the fact that the deer is no longer a living thing. It is no more alive than a heap of dirty clothes or a pile of gravel.
• The stanza ends, still in the eerie red light from the tail-lamps, with the speaker dragging the deer off to the side of the road.
• We are left to ponder the significance of the deer's large belly with the emphasized pause of an end-stopped line (thanks to that nifty little period) at the end of the stanza.

Lines 9-11

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.

• The speaker touches the deer's large belly. Her swollen belly is still warm when the rest of her is "almost cold." The speaker realizes the doe is pregnant and that the fawn is still alive inside the dead mother—"waiting" for a birth that will never happen.
• Okay, so the animal lovers in the crowd were probably pretty shook up way back in stanza 1. But now, even those cold-hearted individuals that thought something along the lines of, "So what—it's just a stupid deer," have to be feeling a little something. If not, please go to Shmoop's psychology section as soon as we are finished here—something may be terribly wrong.
• The end of line 10, "waiting," starts to slow things down and really makes the reader consider the gravity of the situation. The line kind of makes us "wait" to see what will come next because the end-word followed by the comma makes for a slightly stronger pause than if the line were enjambed.
• When we do move on to line 11, we read "alive, still" and it feels like, perhaps, things are taking a turn for the better. The punctuation, the commas, allows us to linger on the words "alive" and "still," but eventually we come to the big downer: "never to be born." The end-stopped line makes us sit with this sadness for a couple of beats, makes us hesitate and consider what has happened. Feeling bummed out yet?

Line 12

Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

• The speaker set out to drag the deer off the edge of the road, to "roll [her] into the canyon." But the realization that the dead deer is pregnant makes the speaker pause.
• If we consider this line as part of the "road of life" metaphor, the speaker is hesitating at the edge of life's road. He was moving in one direction, intending to do what was right, to get rid of the dead so the living could pass safely by, but he "hesitate[s]" there beside the road.
• Remember, from stanza 1, the road of life is "narrow" and "swerving" and might "make more dead." And yet the speaker hesitates in his task to clear away the dead deer because she contains a life (the still-living fawn). The speaker's literal hesitation mirrors the metaphorical swerving. He's not quite ready to move along the path laid out for him.