¶ … panther, by Reiner Maria Rilke and Travelling through the Dark, by William Stafford, are two poems about wild animals and the effects of human kind's interference into their existence. In the case of Rilke's poem, the interaction is intentional: the man has locked one of the most impressive creatures in the wild, a panther, behind bars. In the second poem, the interaction is unintentional: the narrator finds a road kill in the dark, a deer. Even if so different, the animals are symbols for the same world: the world of wilderness. The Panther, expresses the image such an impressive creature as a panther evokes when seen behind bars. The eyes of the panther draw the onlooker, leaving a lasting impression on him. One of the most powerful gazes in the animal world has lost its meaning for the one who sees it behind bars. It is as if the world, as we know it, has ceased to exist. It is a timeless world of nothingness for the wild displaced creature. The new context has no meaning for it.

The caged panther, with its gracious, powerful steps moving in circles, its fixed gaze, its impressive body, its black, shiny, luxurious hair, suggests the mystical dance of an ancient priest. The person on the other side of the bars is aware that he or she stands in the nothingness for this captured animal. That person is looking at it, analyzing it, trying to understand what a wild animal feels when behind bars. Captivity seems to have rendered almost everything in that animal redundant. Only its will, a powerful will is in a state of numbness, like under the effect of a powerful drug the caretakers have injected in its limbs. Those limbs, with their perfect lean and strong muscles, complete the picture of what the panther is there for: to remind the one looking...

The mighty in the middle, the narrator evokes, may wake up some day and push the bars aside. Another thing the narrator seems to guess when looking at the caged panther is that humans are hopeless in their efforts to dominate the other worlds. Physical barriers can only contain the body of a being, but they will never retain and render the essence.
The last verse of the poem shows the creature whose power to kill is still there actually killing. It shows it killing an occasional image it penetrates what one thought was perfectly still. The meaning of that creature in this world is there in spirit, unattained. The panther, like a magician, freezes from time to time, to absorb and bring an image to its very heart where it finds the end. It fulfills thus its destiny.

In the second poem, Travelling Through the Dark, the narrator starts innocently with what could be described as a common image: riding through the nigh, on the edge of a river, a driver almost bumps into road kill. The two beings, the man vs. that of the dead body of an animal, are presented first in a completely disjointed world: "it is usually best to roll them into the canyon." The use of an impersonal voice is deliberate, thus the delimitation between the person behind the wheel and the object of its possible future action being suggested. The pronoun "them" from "to roll them" finishes this separation between those who have the rule "to role them into the canyon," the humans that is, and them, the animals in the wild.

The wilderness is present in the first verse through three symbols: the darkness, the Wilson river…