William Stafford’s poem is made up of four stanzas of four lines each, each line approximately the same length, and a closing couplet that offers, much like couplets in traditional sonnets, a resolution to the poem’s dilemma.

The poem is written in free verse, or without a regular meter or rhyme scheme. Here, each line maintains its own meter, loosely eight beats per line that mimic the rhythms of conversational speech.

Instead of metric regularity, the poem uses consonance, or the repetition of consonant sounds, to create a musical sonic effect. The first two lines of the poem feature a recurring “d” sound: “[T]hrough the dark I found a deer / dead on the edge of the Wilson River road” (Lines 1-2). The repetition makes readers linger on the word “dead” and the alliterative phrase “deer dead”—the crux of the poem’s moral conundrum.

Stafford also juxtaposes unlike sounds to suggest the speaker’s moral hesitancy. For instance in the phrase “alive, still” (Line 11), the sounds dramatize the conflict between life and death.