The Stream by Mona Van Duyn
"The Stream" by Mona Van Duyn is a poignant narrative poem that uses rhymed couplets to explore the complex relationship between a daughter and her aging mother in the days leading up to the mother's death. Set three months after the father’s passing, the poem captures the mother's struggles with memory loss while residing in a nursing home, which she detests. The narrative unfolds over the course of four days, highlighting a special lunch the daughter has planned, which the mother mistakenly prepares for a day early, showcasing her frailty yet persistent desire to connect.
As they share the meal, memories of the mother's past fondness for restaurants emerge, juxtaposed with the daughter’s realization of their strained relationship. The poem crescendos on their final night together, revealing intimate rituals of care and unspoken love, culminating in the mother’s heartfelt expression of affection. Van Duyn uses the metaphor of an underground stream to symbolize the complexities of love, suggesting that while it may remain hidden beneath life's pressures, it can eventually surface, leading to moments of clarity and connection. Ultimately, the poem reflects on love’s multifaceted nature, encompassing loss, regret, joy, and the profound bonds between family members.
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The Stream by Mona Van Duyn
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1982 (collected in Letters from a Father, and Other Poems, 1982)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
“The Stream” is a narrative poem, written in rhymed couplets, which relates the events of the speaker’s last four days spent with her mother. The time is three months after the death of the speaker’s father; her mother is in a nursing home and hates it. The mother’s memory is failing, with the result that, by mistake, she makes a huge effort and dresses herself for a special lunch with her daughter. The lunch is really tomorrow, but the daughter is touched that her frail mother has made so much effort on her own, even fastening to her blouse a pin the daughter once brought her from Madrid.
The daughter has arranged for a special lunch in a lounge in a distant wing of the home, and when they arrive, the mother is uneasy. She does not like it here, she says, and she worries about finding a bathroom if she needs one. Yet when the lunch arrives with its special tablecloth and dishes, she calms herself and enjoys it. She eats more than she has in months, finishes her soup, and eats her own cakes and the daughter’s, too, with the daughter feeding her. The daughter remembers that her mother used to like restaurants, although her husband refused to spend the money for them, and that memory, along with her mother’s urgent thanks, brings tears to the daughter’s eyes.
On their last night together, the daughter helps her mother get ready for bed and watches her go through the rituals of a lifetime—finding the nightgown, washing her face. She looks at the work of age on her mother’s body and, as she prepares to leave, tries to reassure her mother that she will call and write; however, she is stopped by tears. Her mother takes the daughter’s face in her hands, tells her not to cry, and says that the daughter will never know how much she loves her.
At this point, the reader realizes that the relationship between mother and daughter has not been an affectionate one. The speaker’s recognition that the mother makes this gesture as if she had done it all her life makes the reader aware that, in fact, she has not done it. When the daughter says that the statement about love felt true, it is clear that she has not always believed it. The day after the speaker arrives home, the mother dies.
The poem then moves to its central idea: What is love? The speaker compares it to an underground stream, held beneath the surface by pressures no one can understand, perhaps the pressures of the mother’s own youth, her parents and husband. Aboveground, others would like to locate that stream of love, like dowsers searching for water for a well. Even dowsers, though, are helpless until at last the stream finds its own way to the surface, just as the mother’s love was finally articulated when she spoke to her daughter on their last night. It may happen, Van Duyn notes, too slowly, but after sixty years there is a gathering of water at last; to it, the speaker says, she adds her own tears. They are tears of loss and regret, of course, but also tears of love and joy. The combination, Van Duyn implies, is inevitable in this world.
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.