Mona Van Duyn’s poems are known for their intellectual depth, emotional honesty, and graceful use of language. As a former U.S. Poet Laureate, she brought classical discipline together with modern psychological insight, creating poetry that is both thoughtful and deeply human. Her work often explores love, marriage, aging, memory, morality, and the inner life, especially the complexities of long-term relationships.
One of the defining qualities of Mona Van Duyn’s poetry is her clarity. Her poems are carefully structured, often using traditional forms, yet they feel conversational and accessible. She had a remarkable ability to examine ordinary experiences—domestic life, personal doubt, emotional conflict—and reveal their philosophical weight. In poems like “Letters from a Father” and “Toward a Definition of Marriage,” she writes with empathy, wit, and moral seriousness.
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| Mona van duyn |
Van Duyn’s tone is reflective rather than dramatic. She avoids excess emotion, choosing instead precise language and measured insight. Her poems reward slow reading and careful thought, offering wisdom without preaching. Overall, Mona Van Duyn’s poems stand out for their balance of intellect and feeling, making her an important and enduring voice in American poetry.
What The Motorcycle Said
Br-r-ram-m-m, rackety-am-m, OM, Am:
All-r-r-room, r-r-ram, ala-bas-ter-
Am, the world’s my oyster.
I hate plastic, wear it black and slick,
hate hardhats, wear one on my head,
that’s what the motorcycle said.
Passed phonies in Fords, knocked down billboards, landed
on the other side of The Gap, and Whee,
bypassed history.
When I was born (The Past), baby knew best.
They shook when I bawled, took Freud’s path,
threw away their wrath.
R-r-rackety-am-m. Am. War, rhyme,
soap, meat, marriage, the Phantom Jet
are shit, and like that.
Hate pompousness, punishment, patience, am into Love,
hate middle-class moneymakers, live on Dad,
that’s what the motorcycle said.
Br-r-r-am-m-m. It’s Nowsville, man. Passed Oldies, Uglies,
Straighties, Honkies. I’ll never be
mean, tired, or unsexy.
Passed cigarette suckers, souses, mother-fuckers,
losers, went back to Nature and found
how to get VD, stoned.
Passed a cow, too fast to hear her moo, "I rolled
our leaves of grass into one ball.
I am the grassy All."
Br-r-r-am-m-m, rackety-am-m, OM, Am:
All-gr-r-rin, oooohgah, gl-l-utton-
Am, the world’s my smilebutton.
Earth Tremors Felt in Missouri
The quake last night was nothing personal,
you told me this morning. I think one always wonders,
unless, of course, something is visible: tremors
that take us, private and willy-nilly, are usual.
But the earth said last night that what I feel,
you feel; what secretly moves you, moves me.
One small, sensuous catastrophe
makes inklings letters, spelled in a worldly tremble.
The earth, with others on it, turns in its course
as we turn toward each other, less than ourselves, gross,
mindless, more than we were. Pebbles, we swell
to planets, nearing the universal roll,
in our conceit even comprehending the sun,
whose bright ordeal leaves cool men woebegone.
Woman Waiting
Over the gray, massed blunder of her face
light hung crudely and apologetic sight
crossed in a hurry. Asking very little,
her eyes were patiently placed there.
Dress loved nothing and wandered away
wherever possible, needing its own character.
Used to the stories, we wise children
made pleasant pictures of her when alive, till
someone who knew told us it was never so.
Next, wisely waited to see the hidden dancer,
the expected flare leaping through that fog
of flesh, but no one ever did.
In a last wisdom, conceived of a moment
love lit her like a star and the star burned out.
Interested friends said this had never happened.
Death by Aesthetics
Here is the doctor, an abstracted lover,
dressed as a virgin, coming to keep the tryst.
The patient was early; she is lovely; but yet
she is sick, his instruments will agree on this.
Is this the place, she wonders, and is he the one?
Yes, love is the healer, he will strip her bare,
and all his machinery of definition
tells her experience is costly here,
so she is reassured. The doctor approaches
and bends to her heart. But she sees him sprout like a tree
with metallic twigs on his fingers and blooms of chrome
at his eye and ear for the sterile ceremony.
Oh tight and tighter his rubber squeeze of her arm.
"Ahhh" she sighs at a chilly touch on her tongue.
Up the tubes her breath comes crying, as over her,
back and breast, he moves his silver thumb.
His fluoroscope hugs her. Soft the intemperate girl,
disordered. Willing she lies while he unfolds
her disease, but a stem of glass protects his fingertips
from her heat, nor will he catch her cold.
A Kind of Music
When consciousness begins to add diversity to its intensity,
its value is no longer absolute and inexpressible. The felt variations
in its tone are attached to the observed movement of
its objects; in these objects its values are embedded. A world
loaded with dramatic values may thus arise in imagination;
terrible and delightful presences may chase one another
across the void; life will be a kind of music made by all the
senses together. Many animals probably have this kind of
experience.
--Santayana
Irrelevance characterizes the behavior of our puppy.
In the middle of the night he decides that he wants to play,
runs off when he's called, when petted is liable to pee,
cowers at a twig and barks at his shadow or a tree,
grins at intruders and bites us in the leg suddenly.
No justification we humans have been able to see
applies to his actions. While we go by the time of day,
or the rules, or the notion of purpose or consistency,
he follows from moment to moment a sensuous medley
that keeps him both totally subject and totally free.
I'll have to admit, though, we've never been tempted to say
that he jumps up to greet us or puts his head on our knee
or licks us or lies at our feet irrelevantly.
When it comes to loving, we find ourselves forced to agree
all responses are reasons and no reason is necessary
The Gentle Snorer
When summer came, we locked up our lives and fled
to the woods in Maine, and pulled up over our heads
a comforter filled with batts of piney dark,
tied with crickets' chirretings and the bork
of frogs; we hid in a sleep of strangeness from
the human humdrum.
A pleasant noise the unordered world makes wove
around us. Burrowed, we heard the scud of waves,
wrack of bending branch, or plop of a fish
on his heavy home; the little beasts rummaged the brush.
We dimmed to silence, slipped from the angry pull
of wishes and will.
And then we had a three-week cabin guest
who snored; he broke the wilderness of our rest.
As all night long he sipped the succulent air,
that rhythm we shared made visible to the ear
a rich refreshment of the blood. We fed in
unison with him.
A sound we dreamed and woke to, over the snuff
of wind, not loud enough to scare off the roof
the early morning chipmunks. Under our skins
we heard, as after disease, the bright, thin
tick of our time. Sleeping, he mentioned death
and celebrated breath.
He went back home. The water flapped the shore.
A thousand bugs drilled at the darkness. Over
the lake a loon howled. Nothing spoke up for us,
salvagers always of what we have always lost;
and we thought what the night needed was more of man,
he left us so partisan.
The Miser
I was out last night,
the very picture of a sneak, dark and hunched-over,
breaking and entering again.
Why do I do it?
And why, when I can afford serious residences,
do I keep to this one room?
Perhaps if I had not lost track of the difference
between the real and the ideal
it would never have happened.
I hide here almost entirely now.
When I go out, when I creep into those silent houses,
I steal newspapers.
An armload, no more than I can carry comfortably.
Sometimes they are already tied up
on the side porch or by the kitchen stove.
Nobody misses them.
They think each other or the maid
has carried them out to the street.
They say there is something intractable out there,
the Law, the Right to Privacy,
the World.
In the days when my obsession was only a wound-up toy,
squeaking and jabbering in my chest,
I could have believed them.
I sit by the window today
(There is very little space left now,
though I have left corridors wide enough to walk through
so I won't lose touch)
holding my latest on my lap,
handling them, fondling them, taking in every column.
They are becoming more and more precious.
My delusion grows and spreads.
Lately it seems to me
as I read of murders, wars, bankruptcies, jackpot winnings,
the news is written in that perfect style
of someone speaking to the one
who knows and loves him.
Long before they miss me, I think,
the room will be perfectly solid.
When they break in the door and, unsurprised,
hardened to the most bizarre vagaries,
begin to carry out my treasure,
death's what they'll look for underneath it all,
those fluent, muscled, imaginative men,
sweating in their innocent coveralls.
But I will be out in broad daylight by then,
answering,
having accepted utterly the heart's conditions.
Tell them I wish them well, always,
that I've been happy.
