"Roe-Deer" is British poet Ted Hughes's exploration of the mysteries of nature. Out for a walk on a dim, snowy winter morning, the speaker is transfixed by the sight of a pair of deer—and they seem just as fascinated by him. As deer and speaker stare at each other, the speaker begins to imagine crossing over into the deer's parallel "dimension," realizing that a human perspective is far from the only way to see the world. This poem first appeared in Hughes's 1978 collection Moon-Bells and Other Poems.
The speaker tells the story of an encounter with a pair of deer. It was in the low light of early morning on the year's snowiest day, the speaker remembers, that two deer appeared in the road and stopped to stare.
The deer seemed to have crossed over from another world just as the speaker got to this spot.
They'd been living their secluded, mysterious deer-lives for two or three years, the speaker says, and now here they were, suddenly visible through the snow, feeling like an otherworldly anomaly.
They froze in the middle of the disorienting snowfall to stare at the speaker.
And, for a minute, the speaker says, it felt as if the deer were just waiting for the speaker to say a magic word or make a gesture.
It felt as if the speaker were seeing into another world, where everything was different. On this boundary, feeling as if the trees and the road were no longer themselves, it felt as if the deer had come to fetch the speaker.
But finally, the deer took off, passing the hedges at the side of the road and trotting stiffly away down an empty, snowy hill.
Making their way toward the dark woods on the other side of a field, the deer looked as if they were whirling up into the air.
At last, they disappeared into the wild snow. Not only the deer, but their tracks vanished, the speaker remembers.
It seemed as if the snow were revising a poem, erasing a moment of pure inspiration and changing the world into something perfectly ordinary again.
In “Roe-Deer,” the speaker’s encounter with the animal kingdom feels like getting a glimpse of a whole different world. Out for a dawn walk on a snowy winter morning, the speaker runs into two still, silent, watchful deer and feels for a moment as if a “curtain” between two worlds has been drawn back. The deer seem as if they might just be waiting for a “sign” to spirit the speaker away into their own “dimension,” their strangeness reminding the speaker of the divide between humanity and nature. An encounter with animals, the poem suggests, can remind people that their own perspective is limited—and that the world is bigger and stranger than they might think.
When the speaker goes out for an early-morning walk in a snowstorm and runs into two staring deer, their meeting feels like a moment of contact with a world that’s usually hidden from human beings. Transfixed by this vision of “secret deerhood,” the speaker feels as if the deer are visitors from another “dimension,” offering an invitation beyond the “curtain” of everyday life. To the deer, the speaker realizes, this landscape is a completely different place than it is for people. Standing on the edge of the deer’s world, the speaker feels that the “trees were no longer trees, nor the road a road”—lines that suggest that, to a deer, the concept of a “road” or a “tree” simply doesn’t exist in the same way it does for a person. The deer, the speaker sees, live lives utterly and mysteriously separate from humanity’s, and the speaker’s own way of seeing the world is just one among many.
This moment of contact between animal and human thus gives the speaker a glimpse of just how mysterious the world really is—and how much people can’t see as they go about their daily lives. When the deer at last walk away and the snow erases their footprints, the speaker feels the world has gone “back to the ordinary.” But the “ordinary,” the poem suggests, is only one way to see things—and perhaps it’s even a limiting “curtain,” a veil between people and the living world around them. Encounters with nature can thus remind people that the world is a rich, strange, and magical place, full of possibilities they might not even be able to imagine.
In the dawn-dirty ...
... arriving just there.
The first stanza of "Roe-Deer" works like a stage curtain rising to reveal a mysterious scene. Take a look at the anaphora in the first line:
In the dawn-dirty light, in the biggest snow of the year
That repeated "in the" creates anticipation: what is it that the speaker will see "in the" early light and the snow? The second line reveals all:
Two blue-dark deer stood in the road, alerted.
The imagery of those "blue-dark" deer in "dawn-dirty light" draws readers right into the scene: this is the early, early morning, with heavy snow-clouds letting only dim, shadowless light through. The speaker, presumably out for a walk (or perhaps a drive), has come across two deer in the middle of the road. The single word "alerted" paints a vivid picture of the deer's turned heads and pricked ears, suddenly aware of the speaker's presence. And all on their own, these sights also conjure sounds—or the lack of them: the muffled quiet of a snowy dawn.
The speaker's encounter with those two deer in this silent landscape already feels more like a first contact with aliens than a picturesque moment in the countryside. These deer, the speaker goes on in the second stanza, seem as if they've come from another "dimension" at exactly "the moment I was arriving just there," a phrasing that insists on how unexpected and fortuitous this meeting feels. If the speaker or the deer had turned up just a few seconds later, their "dimensions" couldn't have overlapped this way. Through this chance meeting, the speaker will catch a glimpse of a whole different world.
This free verse poem's shape will mirror the speaker's vision of nature's strangeness. Readers may already have noticed that most of the stanzas here are unrhymed couplets: they arrive two by two, like the two deer themselves. (One notable exception will appear later on—keep an eye out!)
And while the poem doesn't use rhyme, it does use intense patterns of sound to create music and atmosphere. Listen again to those first two lines:
In the dawn-dirty light, in the biggest snow of the year
Two blue-dark deer stood in the road, alerted.
Here, /d/ and /b/ alliteration sounds like muffled footsteps in snow; /oh/ and /oo/ assonance evokes a faint winter wind, the only sound in a silent world.
They planted their ...
... stared at me.
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Get LitCharts A+And for some ...
... come for me.
Then they ducked ...
... of big flakes.
The snow took ...
... to the ordinary
Rich imagery helps readers to feel as if they're standing alongside the speaker, sharing a mysterious encounter with a pair of deer.
The poem begins by vividly painting the moment of this encounter:
In the dawn-dirty light, in the biggest snow of the year
Two blue-dark deer stood in the road, alerted.
That "dawn-dirty light" suggests the grayness of low winter sunlight through thick clouds; this is the kind of light that isn't even strong enough to make shadows. And it's so early that the deer, when they appear, are only "blue-dark" shapes against what the speaker will later call the "all-way disintegration" of snowflakes flurrying through the air. This is a vivid, exact image of a tricky, blurred, dimly lit landscape.
And listen to what happens at the end of the poem when the deer break the speaker's stare and trot away:
[...] upright they rode their legs
Away downhill over a snow-lonely fieldTowards tree dark [...]
The image of the deer "riding" their legs will be familiar to anyone who's ever watched a deer hot-footing it away: even as their legs move, their upper bodies stay upright, still, and watchful. As they disappear into the "tree dark"—that is, the shadow of the trees on the other side of that "snow-lonely" field—the speaker feels as if a portal to another world has closed right back up again.
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A small, delicate species of deer.
Written in free verse, "Roe-Deer" uses a form of Hughes's own invention. The poem's 11 stanzas are almost all two-line unrhymed couplets. That two-by-two form mimics what the speaker sees: a pair of deer, standing in the road and staring in the low, "dawn-dirty" light.
But the seventh stanza stands apart. This stanza is built from just one line: "The deer had come for me." This moment feels like an invitation into a mystery, and that one stark line suggests that the boundary between the deer's world and the speaker's has become, for just a few seconds, very thin indeed.
This poem is written in free verse, so it doesn't have a regular meter. Instead, Hughes uses changing line lengths to give the poem rhythm and movement.
Most of the stanzas in the first 12 lines of the poem ("In the dawn-dirty light [...] nor the road a road") are around the same length, evoking the balanced, watchful stillness of the pair of deer the speaker observes on the road. But take a look at what happens when the deer finally trot away:
Then they ducked through the hedge, and upright they rode their legs
Away downhill over a snow-lonely field
That combination of a longer and shorter line suggests the deer's sudden motion—and the sight of the deer getting smaller and smaller as they make their way over that "snow-lonely field" and are lost among the "big flakes."
This free verse poem doesn't use rhyme. Instead, sonic devices like assonance, alliteration, and sibilance create its music.
Listen to the first stanza, for instance:
In the dawn-dirty light, in the biggest snow of the year
Two blue-dark deer stood in the road, alerted.
Here, dense /d/ alliteration, haunting /oo/ assonance, and whispery /s/ and /st/ sibilance evoke a whole winter scene of muted darkness and silent snowfall.
All the reader learns about this poem's speaker is that they're is out for a dawn walk when an encounter with a pair of deer makes them feel as if they're standing on the boundary between two worlds. Both that solitary morning stroll through "the biggest snow of the year" and that sense of mystery, wonder, and awe suggest that this speaker is a thoughtful, introspective, and curious soul—a person open to the world's strangeness and magic.
The setting here—which sounds a lot like Ted Hughes's own England—might hint that this speaker is Hughes himself. Hughes often wrote of his intense encounters with the natural world. The poem's closing metaphor of the snow as a writer "[r]evising its dawn inspiration" suggests that this speaker is at the very least familiar with the art of poetry!
This poem is set in the wintertime at dawn. The "hedge," the "field" edged with "tree dark," and the heavy snow all suggest the English countryside in which Hughes himself spent much of his life.
This landscape transforms from familiar to enchanted as the speaker encounters a pair of deer on an early-morning walk. The sight of the two staring animals makes the speaker feel as if "the curtain had blown aside for a moment"—as if it were possible to see beyond the everyday world and into a different, mysterious reality. In this instant, the commonplace "trees" and "road" become strange, "no longer" themselves.
By setting the poem in a landscape that unites human-made "roads" and "fields" with wild nature, Hughes suggests that "ordinary" life comes right up to the edge of magical boundaries more often than one might expect. The mysterious is always right there behind the "curtain," even on an everyday walk.
The English poet Ted Hughes (1930-1998) is considered one of the foremost writers of the 20th century. His arrival on the scene with his 1957 debut, The Hawk in the Rain, was a shock to the system of British poetry; Hughes's raw imagery challenged the dominance of more restrained and formal poets like Philip Larkin. To this day, Hughes remains one of the most widely read poets in the English language. "Roe-Deer" was first published in one of his mid-career collections, Moon-Bells and Other Poems (1978), a book of poems intended for children.
Hughes grew up in West Riding, Yorkshire, a relatively rural part of England, and he cultivated an early interest in the natural world that would influence his poetry. This poem is one of many he wrote that captures an intense, disorienting encounter with nature. Hughes was both reverent and unsentimental about the natural world, seeing it not just as a source of wisdom and beauty (as the 19th-century Romantics like William Wordsworth often did) but also as a place full of instinctive violence and danger.
Hughes was deeply influenced by the work of his wife, fellow poet Sylvia Plath. Over the course of their (often tormented) marriage, the pair produced a rich, unsettling body of work. Both were inspired by the English countryside in which they set up home; readers might well imagine Hughes himself facing this poem's mysterious deer on a snowy morning.
Over the course of his long and prolific career (which ran from the 1950s until his death in 1998), Hughes saw wild social change. He began publishing his poetry during a period of rapid post-war urbanization and industrialization. Britain had a booming manufacturing industry in products as diverse as ships, cars, metals, and textiles, but with this boom came increasing pollution. Hughes's poetry, with its interest in wild nature and animal instinct, might be read as a skeptical rejoinder to a post-war enthusiasm for civilizing, scientific progress.
But "Roe-Deer," like a lot of Hughes's animal poetry, steps outside its specific historical context. The encounter with nature the speaker describes here could have happened at any time. This, perhaps, is part of the point: the otherworldly natural "dimension" the deer seem to invite the speaker into doesn't run to a human timescale!
Hughes also always found awe and inspiration in nature, even in the natural world's harshest moments. Though he grew up hunting in the North Yorkshire countryside, as an adult he came to prefer capturing animals on the page.
The Ted Hughes Society — Visit the Ted Hughes Society's website to learn more about Hughes's continuing influence.
Hughes's Legacy — Read an article by poet Alice Oswald in which she discusses what Hughes means to her.
A Brief Biography — Learn more about Hughes's life and work via the Poetry Foundation.
An Interview with Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath — Listen to a 1961 interview with Hughes and his wife, fellow poet Sylvia Plath.
An Appreciation of Hughes — Watch a talk celebrating Hughes's poetry, including clips of Hughes himself reading his poetry aloud.
What Are Roe Deer? — Learn more about the small species of deer featured in this poem.