The Telephone Explication

“The Telephone” by Robert Frost is quietly intriguing in its use of tone to create the feel of conversation. The first and third stanzas are metaphors, while the shorter lines tend to be said without emotion, and involve no figurative language. This is a surprisingly strange contrast since there isn't a cut-and-dry line in the whole poem from the other speaker. On one hand, quotes such as, “When leaning with my head against a flower, I heard you talk.” And “You spoke from that flower on the window sill,” have a lot of flow in how you would read them, and seem almost childish and harmless. On the other hand, a line such as, “First tell me what it was you thought you heard.” is far more abrasive. You can tell this by the length of the line, and when read aloud, it is not something you would say to someone you wanted to impress. In contrast with the other lines, which are airy and metaphorical, the shorter ones have neither of those traits. This small change creates an entirely new scene around two, three-dimensional characters.  

Traveling Though the Dark

1. The speaker's dilemma is that there is a dead deer laying on the side of the road, and he is debating whether or not he should push it into the river. On one hand, having the deer on the road is dangerous for oncoming traffic, on the other, the deer is ripe with a baby. He is the kind of person who would stand on a dark, cold street, taking the time to decide whether or not to push a dead deer into the river, and this shows compassion and selflessness. He calls his hesitation "my only swerving" because he doesn't want to be the bringer of death. In line four, he comments that the dead might cause trouble for other drivers and so he felt the need to remove it. These two lines connect because both are alluding too a possible death- one being a fellow driver, the other the mother deer. 
2. "She had stiffened already, almost cold" and "...her side was warm; her fawn lay waiting" both come within two lines of each other, but they signify very different things. They are both talking about the same deer, but one gives an image of a baby doe, something cute and warm, while the other describes the emaciated body of its mother it seemed to have crawled out of. Another contrasting statement is in one line "...alive, still, never to be born". At first glance, you think the baby might be dead because two of the describing words are reminiscent of a still-born, and 'alive' doesn't really stand out within this line of dead words. The third example is the description of the car that comes directly before the pushing of the deer into the ravine. The car is described with lines like "under the hood purred the engine" and "The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights", words like 'purred' and 'aimed' give the car a human effect using personification, which is strange because no other living things in this poem are described similarly. Even the living seem already dead. 
3. The author, in this circumstance, is using slant rhyming. Every end word in the second and fourth line in each stanza was loosely rhymed. Like 'deer' and 'dead' or 'waiting' and 'hesitated". The line that has no connection is "It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:" because canyon doesn't rhyme with anything in the first stanza.