How are situational irony, allegory, and schemes used in Louise Erdrich's poem titled "Jacklight"?

Louise Erdrich's poem titled "Jacklight" describes how
forest animals (perhaps deer) are lured toward a bright light held by hunters -- a kind
of light that is typically illegal to use in hunting because its purpose is to stun
animals into motionlessness.  In Erdrich's poem, however, the animals eventually move
back into the darkness of the forest, followed by the hunters, whose light is now
ineffective.

Dictionary.com offers a brief and helpful
definition of "situational irony," a literary technique that seems to be used in this
poem:

irony
involving a situation in which actions have an effect that is opposite from what was
intended, so that the outcome is contrary to what was
expected.

This definition
seems to fit the ending of Erdrich's poem, since the hunters fail (this time) to kill
the game they pursue. They lure the game toward them, but by the end of the poem the
spell of the light seems ineffective and the hunters themselves seemed lured toward the
game, or at least deeper into the forest the animals consider home. There is even,
perhaps, a touch of the ominous in the poem's final lines, as if the hunters are
entering potentially dangerous territory:

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And now they take the first steps, not
knowing

how deep the woods are and
lightless.

How deep the woods
are.

The poem ends
mysteriously, and readers are left to wonder what will happen to the hunters and what
they will find as they go deeper and deeper into the woods.  In any case, the poem does
seem to display situational irony, since the hunters fail (at least initially) to
achieve their original objective.

Erdrich's poem has
generated several allegorical interpretations -- that is, interpretations in which the
animals and the hunters seem to symbolize something other than mere or literal animals
and hunters.  The epigraph that opens the poem seems, in fact, to invite readers to
interpret the poem allegorically. Some critics have accepted the invitation and have
suggested that the poem allegorizes the relations between women (the animals) and men
(the hunters).  Others have suggested that the poem may allegorize the relations between
Native Americans (the animals) and whites (the hunters). Cases can be made for both
readings, and indeed these two readings are not mutually exclusive. Insofar as women are
often the pursued rather than the pursuers in relationships, and insofar as women
sometimes demonstrate their own kinds of power in such relationships, the poem may
indeed allegorize relations between men and women.  The same kind of connection can be
made between whites and Native Americans.

The poem
definitely also employs rhetorical "schemes" (or figures of speech), a topic I have
dealt with at length elsewhere (see link below). For example, the last three lines of
the poem (quoted above) use alliteration ("they . . .
the"), assonance ("they
take"), anaphora (the repetition of "how" at the beginnings of the
final two lines), parallelism (the repetition of "how deep the woods are"), and striking
imagery (as in the adjective
"lightless").