Summary
The speaker muses on the strangeness of death, which has had the power to bring down the buck into the snow. Meanwhile, the speaker speculates that the doe is now far away, standing under the snow-covered trees. As the doe looks outward, her own eyes are full of life.
Analysis
The poem's final stanza begins with a set of juxtapositions, held within the phrase "bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers/The buck in the snow." One of these juxtapositions is height. With the word "down" and the image of snow on the ground—as well as the subtle suggestion of reaching and tallness brought by the word "antlers"—the poem contrasts the towering buck with his reduced, grounded form in death. Another juxtaposition evoked here is that between wildness and domesticity, or, synonymously, animal and human. By mentioning both knees (a body part possessed by humans) and antlers (a body part possessed only by male deer), the poem highlights the difference between the buck and the speaker. Indeed, the speaker first mentions knees, using the cliche phrase "bringing to his knees." Only after, seemingly as a kind of correction, does she note that another phrase is more appropriate to her subject. She seemingly forces herself to let go of preconceptions and treat the buck on his own terms, without anthropomorphizing him.
The poem also juxtaposes the buck and the doe, placing them in contrast to one another, though they were treated as a set in the poem's opening stanza. Whereas the buck is still, the doe is portrayed as moving through both time and space: "a mile away by now [...] as the moments pass." Moreover, while the buck is brought literally low to the ground, the doe is still associated with height. She is located not in the snow on the ground, as the buck is, but among the snowy branches. The snow surrounds both animals, but it is positioned differently, in one case still and fallen and in the other shifting and dynamic. In other words, the living and dead deer are not so much opposites as they are two sides of the same coin, or two places in a life cycle. This relationship of closeness and contrast is reflected in their snowy surroundings.
The speaker grants the buck a degree of dignity by refusing to anthropomorphize him—allowing the animal to exist on its own terms rather than as an object of the speaker's human-centric gaze. The same is true of the doe, in a different way. The poem ends with the image of the doe's gaze. By leaving readers with an image of the animal looking outwards at the world, the speaker grants her, too, agency and dignity. She is permitted to exist as a subject rather than as the object of another person's gaze. The poem's evocation of animals existing on their own terms is a powerful one, especially when one considers that the buck, who lives near humans, may have died at human hands. This power is increased by the grammatical structure of the poem's closing lines. Millay waits to insert the words "life" and "doe" until the close of the sentence, packing on lines of description before sharing this information so that it comes as a surprise.
