19 pages • 38 minutes read
Deer Hit
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“Deer Hit” consists of couplet stanzas in two sections, with an extra line single line ending each section. Irregular iambic pentameter structures the lines, with several instances of inverted feet and catalexis.
The lines mostly avoid end rhyme, but internal rhyme and alliterative patterns knit the poem together sonically. Lines like “stamp both feet on the brake, skid and jolt” (Line 8) with its envelope alliteration and “frantic circle, front legs scrambling” (Line 16) with cross alliteration provide a lighter acoustic unity than full rhyme but give the lines a subtle musicality. Assonance also stands in for rhyme, pulling together passages like “You watch for a while. It tires, lies still” (Line 19).
Part 2 runs about thirty percent shorter than Part 1, further suggesting the break in the poem represents a kind of intermission, as in a movie or play. The total number of Lines--52—suggests a deck of cards: a tool of risk and fate, often in the hands of gangsters and magicians.
Synecdoche
Loomis’s haunting synecdoche in the poems’ sixth line, the “road full of eyeballs” that stands in for the clump of deer, works both in its metaphoric and literal form. Lights illuminate only the reflection of the deer’s eyes, making the image appear to the driver as disembodied eyes, “small moons glowing” (Line 7). Synecdoche, the substitution of a part of an object to represent its entirety, proves to be a fitting device in this poem where many moments merit intricate description, but the poet conveys the deer’s killing, the most explicit moment of violence, only with the image of the concrete block. The driver ends by assigning the memory of it all, as well as his additional “trail of ruin” (Line 52) to the “dent / in your nose” (Line 51-52), the physical reminder, the piece that stands in for a legacy of violence.
Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia accompanies alliteration as part of the awkward music of “Deer Hit.” Sickening crunches, cries of pain, and other visceral representations of sound tie the poem into forces beneath language and more base than civilized behavior.
The deer’s “terrible bleat” echoes “again and again” in Line 18. The deer “shudders and bleats” again in Line 47, back at the driver’s house.
Like the final line of Robert Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” which reads “Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r—you swine!” (Line 72), “Deer Hit” swings from onomatopoeia in lines like “glitter and crunch of broken glass” (Line 9), mimicking the sounds of an accident’s aftermath, to the device’s parallel and opposite, hieronymy. Both Browning and Loomis invoke divine names through characters who use the holy terms as curses, rather than as an invocation of grace. The father’s exclamations of “Christ” in Line 36 and “Jesus” in Line 40 match the profanity of “Son of a bitch” in Line 41.
The range of human sentiment and morality swings on that same pendulum between the sub-speech of onomatopoeia and the prayer of hieronymy. The presence of both devices in “Deer Hit” extends the poem’s depiction of a struggle between power and subjugation, between good and evil.
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