Three Valentines to the Wide World by Mona Van Duyn
"Three Valentines to the Wide World" is a poem by Mona Van Duyn, which serves as the opening piece in her debut collection. The poem is divided into three distinct sections, each reflecting on themes of love, beauty, and the human experience. The title suggests a universal message, as the poet addresses her "valentines" to the vastness of the world.
The first section introduces a young girl contemplating the nature of love, juxtaposing innocence with the realities of suffering and mortality. This introspection is a key element, as the speaker reminisces about childhood beliefs and the hope that the girl will retain her sense of wonder as she matures. The second section shifts to a more meditative tone, exploring the role of poetry in capturing the specifics of life, contrasting the abstract nature of vast landscapes with the immediacy of personal experience. Here, the poet emphasizes the transformative power of poetry to evoke discovery and nostalgia.
In the final section, Van Duyn reflects on the duality of beauty, suggesting that while it can be overwhelming, it is love and art that provide balance and compassion. Through these interconnected themes, the poem invites readers to contemplate the relationships between love, memory, and the beauty of the world.
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Three Valentines to the Wide World by Mona Van Duyn
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1959 (collected in Valentines to the Wide World, 1959)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
“Three Valentines to the Wide World” is the first poem in Van Duyn’s first book. In looking at the poem’s three parts, the reader should remember that a valentine is a short love message, and Van Duyn has addressed these messages to the world, emphasizing in her title the world’s vastness.
Part 1 is written in twelve-line stanzas, each stanza composed of three rhymed quatrains. That the rhyme is often slant rhyme (listening is rhymed with chastening, for example) does not diminish its effect.
The first stanza describes an eight-year-old child, awkward and graceless, who stands scratching a scab on her knee. In the second stanza, she asks her profound question without even looking up from her knee: “Mother, is love God’s hobby?” The speaker believes that the girl has not yet noticed that suffering and death inhabit the world, that she thinks of God as a gardener who will eventually create new leaves from dead stems. The child receives no answer, and the speaker takes her mind back to her own childhood, when anything seemed possible, including the idea that love sustains the world. Section 1 ends with a sort of prayer that the child will be able to maintain her sense of a world eternally re-created as she grows into “the grace of her notion.”
The second section is composed of seven four-line rhymed stanzas. The tone of this section is more reserved than that of the first; the section forms a sort of meditation on beauty and the function of poetry. The speaker begins by saying that she has never liked landscapes that are huge vistas, the kind one sees from roadside overlooks. They are too divorced from the immediacy of specifics. That loss of awareness of the specific must affect truck drivers, she thinks, as they roll along in a world where everything below the cabs of their trucks must blur into abstraction.
The antidote to this distance is the poem, the speaker says; its function is to create a sort of pressure. “To find some spot on the surface/ and then bear down until the skin can’t stand/ the tension and breaks under it. . . .” Only a poem is strong enough to do that, and when it does, the result is both discovery and reminiscence—just what the speaker experienced in the first section. The writer’s joy is to use discovery and reminiscence to create, rather like God the gardener.
Section 3 is composed of three eight-line rhyming stanzas and is introduced by a quotation from Geoffrey Chaucer in which the poet says that he cannot bear the beauty of a certain lady’s eyes; they will slay him. The speaker here says that, like the lady’s eyes, the beauty of earth seems merciless, powerful enough to kill, except when it is tempered by love and art—things in which compassion resides.
Bibliography
Burns, Michael, ed. Discovery and Reminiscence: Essays on the Poetry of Mona Van Duyn. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998.
Hall, Judith. “Strangers May Run: The Nation’s First Woman Poet Laureate.” The Antioch Review 52, no. 1 (Winter, 1994): 141.
Prunty, Wyatt.“Fallen from the Symboled World”: Precedents for the New Formalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.