After a cursory investigation, I have revised somewhat my general impression as to vale's being out or within feasibility today in poetry. To be sure, the word is such that the mere mention by itself smacks of archaism, and would seem to darken a composition necessarily with an old word were it to be used in the present moment. It is not sufficiently considered, however, that vale is of necessity or virtually untenable in current poetry, as the following cases will serve to hint at. First, too anachronistic to contemporaneous ears, perhaps, would be such use of vale as we find here, from Frost:
When I was young, we dwelt in a vale
By a misty fen that rang all night,
And thus it was the maidens pale
I knew so well, whose garments trail
Across the reeds to a window light. (from In a Vale)
What availed in Frost’s day may not in our own. Yet imitation of the Bible’s stylistic and rhetorical character is such a tradition in poetry as continues to manifest here and there up to the present, and as it has been resuscitated in every age, I cannot imagine that it would not preserve in futurity. I mention this because vale finds a useful and fit place in imitation of this kind, however recent the poet be who undertakes to do such. Phoebe Hesketh (1945-1999) will serve to exemplify what I mean in
The Vale of Seven; Elegy for an Irish Poet:
A stranger to himself, he views the past
As through a telescope, to find
Forgotten images with power to kill—
A creature in its shell.
This is the Vale of Seven—
Seven crosses and the seven pines
Shielding the roofless church from wind and rain.
Vale here conduces to the Biblical undertone. We can even look to Ginsburg who evokes a Biblical, Miltonic tenor in
Wales Visitation; such lofty strains conjured here purposefully echos that epic verse of Milton or Scripture, with a view, in part to lace with satire aimed toward today. This just a brief excerpt:
Bardic, O Self, Visitacione, tell naught
but what seen by one man in a vale in Albion,
of the folk, whose physical sciences end in Ecology,
the wisdom of earthly relations,
of mouths & eyes interknit ten centuries visible
orchards of mind language manifest human,
of the satanic thistle that raises its horned symmetry
flowering above sister grass-daisies' pink tiny
bloomlets angelic as lightbulbs—
If vale may be used to evoke biblical overtones, then it may likewise pointed ironies, in the placement of certain modern contexts. Observe in
The Recall Of The Star Miraflor [from Ground Work II-In The Dark (1987)], a poem by Robert Duncan
The turban and the veil
lead us to the turbine in the vale
where we have been before
flowers forever bloom—sit is the dale of profusions,
of the mind's lingering, of the heart's stop,
here, where perfumes and colors pour,
More irony which vale functions to enforce in this poem, not at all embarrassed or tainted by archaism, on
teargas.
This vale of teargas,
More a hospital than an inn.
Clarity begins at home,
How far does it spread?
A gathering is a mob,
Mobs are to be dispersed
Back to their homes
(Lucky to have one)
Back to their jobs
(Lucky to have one)
Why subscribe to clarity?
In this vale of teargas
Should one enter a caveat,
Or a monastery?
I fancy the word vale is intimately connected to the English countryside at the least, having places named such and such Vale, and the natural features of the country being described, through the ages, as vales. For this reason, I'd venture the use of it seems less out of place in C. Day-Lewis's poem entitled
Dedham Vale, Easter 1954 FOR E. J. H.It was much the same, no doubt,
When nature first laid down
These forms in his youthful heart.
Only the windmill is gone
Which made a miller's son
Attentive to the clouds.
This is the vale he knew—
Its games of sun and shower,
Willow and breeze, the truant
Here-and-there of the Stour;
And an immutable church tower
To polarize the view.
I am not persuaded that vale is so anachronistic as to be
as beyond potential usage in the present moment as the sound of it would have one, quite naturally, assume. But for this discussion having arisen, I might not have wondered at the appearance of vale in
Sudden Squall, for instance, by David Gascoyne, thus
Withering leaf and bloom
Like pebbles falls the hail,
Like chips of stone the sleet
Out of the sudden gloom
Across the peaceful vale
Just now so bright.
While we are waiting for
The sulky storm to stop
Hour after hour,
Watching the garden lake
Toss the toy ship,
The orchard fast falls dark
And bruised fruits drop.
One last quote from Donald Davie’s Evening on the Boyne
The Boyne at Navan swam in light,
Where children headlong through the trees
Plunged down the sward, and nicked the bright
Precarious evening with unease.
Swans at the bottom of a vale,
Sailing rapidly from sight,
Made the sweet arrangements fail
And emptied all the precious light.
Mind you all this is only the first examples I so happened to be able to stir up; I put it forth as food for thought if nothing else.
Best,
Erik