[Michael Juster]

Is a "vale" interchangeable with a "valley" or are there subtle differences eluding the good doctor?

[Julie Steiner]

Feeling ambivalent, huh?

For me, the main difference between the two is that I've never heard a living person say "vale" who wasn't referring to an Appalachian folksong.

[Edited to say: Or praying the Rosary--although a lot of the congregation says "valley of tears" these days, instead of the "vale of tears" I learned. Further evidence that the word "vale" tends to strike modern sensibilities as archaic and/or excessively poetic, even to people who seem to have no problem saying "To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this" immediately beforehand.]

[Erik Olson]

A "vale" is nothing but a "valley", though especially one which is comparatively wide and flat. A "valley" is nothing but a "vale", though typically longer, whereas a vale is typically wider. Though the two are interchangeable with only this subtle difference between the one and the other. Both valley and vale usually having a river or stream flowing along its bottom. That's what I understand as far as their sense.

[Brian Allgar]

Julie, you might like to know that from 1964 until a couple of years ago, when the house had to be sold, my family home in England was in a place called Kingston Vale. So it's a word that I've often said, although I know nothing whatsoever about Appalachian folksong.

[Roger Slater]

But that's part of a proper name, Brian, if I'm understanding you correctly.

I agree with Julie. I'd add that "vale" sounds self-consciously poetic and somewhat archaic, something to be avoided in this vale of tears wherein we dwell.

[Julie Steiner]

Originally Posted by Brian Allgar

So it's a word that I've often said

So you were a valedictorian! I suspected as much.

[Douglas G. Brown]

Hereabouts, low, relatively flat land alongside a river is sometimes called an intervale. Usually it is farmland. (What people to the south and west of here call "bottomland".)

Farmington, Maine lies partly on an intervale of the Sandy River. Where it is on each side of the river, it is pluralized as "intervales". I never have heard "vale" used alone, by the way. Farmington also is the home of University of Maine at Farmington, where (mostly non - metrical) poets abound. They probably know more about this than I do.

On the coast, where I live, we just say valley. I never heard the word intervale until I first visited a friend of mine who lives near Farmington.
I suspect that there are other localities that still used intervale and vale, despite their archaic sound.

Otherwise, I agree with Eric.

[Erik Olson]

I can't disagree, except to say there's always exceptions to be found with anything, though that you already knew. A bit of a shame though as I like the sound of vale and like not so much to think another alternative word for valley lost. Poor vale.

[Michael Cantor]

Originally Posted by Julie Steiner

So you were a valedictorian! I suspected as much.

The word "valedictorian" is really only used in the US and Canada. Brian is British. I believe he was a valet. In Kingston.

[Erik Olson]

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