"Deer Hit", Jon Loomis

1) THE POEM

click here

2) VOCABULARY

5. teazle: plants with prickly leaves and flower heads

3) ANALYSIS

(a) "Deer Hit" is a poem about the mistakes made during teenage years. It is about the bad choices we make because of how naive we are, and how these choices affect us. Sometimes choices we make are good for us in the long run, but other times, the outcomes of these choices hurt us or the people and world around us. 

(b) This poem is about the lack of maturity in teenagers that leads to harmful decisions. It is about how, when you are young, you never want to mess up, never want to disappoint. At the same time, however, you do not have enough life experience to not mess up and make these mistakes. You are too young to make the perfect decisions. In "Deer Hit", the poor decision of drunk driving was made first and foremost, but the decision to carry an injured deer home is also made out of ignorance and inexperience. It is made out of a constant pressure not to mess up, to act responsible and like an adult. We always want to fix any problems we have created and we abandon any rational thinking and instead, base our actions off of a certain foolishness and a need to please. We try to save things that we see as beautiful or precious, like, in the poem, the deer. We have this want to preserve any beauty in our lives by making what we feel are the right decisions. We never want to mess anything up, and sometimes, by trying not to, we create more harm than good. In the poem, the boy tries to rescue the deer out of a feeling of guilt and a want to save it. He does not think about how the deer will react to being saved, or what his father will do, or how this action could impact him. "Deer Hit" is a lesson for the audience, teaching us that sometimes we need to stop, slow down, reconsider our actions before we go through with them. We do not have a personal responsibility to save everything and we should not try to, because sometimes things do not need our saving and we will only end up damaging ourselves in the long run.

4) PERSONAL CONNECTION

As a sixteen-year-old, I can relate to the pressures of being a teenager that are written about in the poem. While I-- and most teens-- have never been in an experience identical to the one written about in the poem, there have been many instances where I have felt to pressure to fix something that was broken. This has happen many times in friendships. Friendships, especially ones during teenage years, come with conflicts and whenever there is any type of fighting going on between my friends and I, I always feel a need to fix everything, and make sure we are all happy. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes it does not. I do not have the answers to every problem in my life, and I know that I still have plenty to learn about as I get older and further mature. All teenagers make mistakes, and some may stay with us for the rest of our lives, but we know that we will only learn from these mistakes and someday, we will have learned enough so that we stop making them.