Willia William Stafford's Traveling Through The Dark

“Man is not himself only...He is all that he sees; all that flows to him from a thousand sources...He is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys” (Brooks 190). Yet, much of mankind believes that they have a supremacy over the natural world. Humanity has developed an anthropocentric philosophy, which is a belief that man is the supreme entity in the cosmos and the natural world should be defined in terms of their morals and knowledge. Society has forgotten that without nature, mankind cannot and will not thrive or survive William Stafford relates these opposing ideas in poetic form through a man’s solitary conflict to respond to a tragic occurrence that he encounters. The poet conveys the struggle that happens when anthropocentric ideas conflict with biocentrism or the belief that man is in fact equal to the importance of nature.
Mankind perceives the advancement of technology as beneficial to society; however, technology is distancing humanity from the natural world.
Although invisible and fleeting, time is a vital variable in awareness. Mankind, due to the idea of anthropocentricism, now focuses on the here and now. The future and the past have become intangible for society. Strafford illustrates man’s limited awareness of time as he examines death, “by the glow of the tail-light” (Strafford 5) and “lowered parking lights” (Strafford 13). The driver sees only a selected area of time, the here and now. Humanity sees only digital time and has lost the philosophical idea of analog time. Society, “assumes that science knows what makes the community clock tick; the scientist is equally sure that he does not” (Leopold). Digital time