16 pages • 32 minutes read
Naomi Shihab NyeValentine for Ernest Mann
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“Valentine for Ernest Mann” is a 29-line poem written in free verse, following no set pattern of rhyme or rhythm, but breaking into four distinct stanzas. Each stanza presents a new movement of the poem, beginning with a direct address and simile in the first stanza then moving toward a resolution to Ernest Mann’s request in the second stanza. The third stanza presents a story as a way of illuminating the speaker’s answer, and the final stanza offers a way to move forward in the world, in community and conversation.
While the poem does not adhere to any strict form, Nye nonetheless makes use of figurative language, like simile and metaphor, and uses enjambment to pace the poem and create tension, drawing the reader’s attention to the images Nye wants to emphasize.
Personification
“Valentine for Ernest Mann” uses personification, or the assigning of human characteristics to non-human subjects, to emphasize the importance of poetry in human life. Throughout the poem, Nye uses verbs like “sleeping,” “hiding,” “crawled,” and “curled” to evoke an active, living sense of poetry. She wants to cast poems as something that humans must actively participate in and engage with, telling the reader “What we have to do / is live in a way that lets us find them” (Lines 12-13). For Nye, poetry is a living, breathing thing, and personifying it emphasizes the importance she places on the relationship humans must cultivate with it. Using verbs that suggest sleep or hiding helps her convey the role she feels humans have: to understand how to live in a way that allows them to find poems and then to see things in such a way that they can coax the poems out. In the same way that the man’s reinvention of the skunks as an object of beauty allowed the poems to “craw out and curl up at his feet” (Line 25), Nye suggests that cultivating a similar relationship with the world, devoid of outward cultural claims and expectations, will help her reader experience a new kind of beauty. Personifying “poems” allows Nye to convince the reader of their living nature.
Conversational Tone & Use of Everyday Speech
By employing a conversational tone and the phrasings of everyday speech throughout the poem, Nye highlights the importance of finding poetry in everyday, unexpected places. She begins the poem in the second person, relaying a hypothetical conversation with casual phrases like “I’ll take two” (Line 2) and “Still, I like your spirit” (Line 5). A humor undergirds these lines, drawing the reader in and offering comfort and warmth. She takes Ernest’s request seriously, and the act of writing this poem about poetry in a conversational tone allows the reader to see an actual manifestation of her argument.
The rhetorical arguments that Nye makes in the poem—one must “live in a way that lets us find [poems]” (Line 13) and “Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us / we find poems” (Lines 26-27)—are in simple, straightforward language, without any of the flourishes one might typically describe as poetic. Like the examples of places where poems hide — in the “bottoms of our shoes” (Line 9), “drifting across our ceilings” (Line 11), or in a pair of skunks — her language demonstrates that poetry can be unfussy, earnest, and honest. She wants poetry to be accessible and relatable to a larger swath of the population and utilizing everyday speech helps her achieve this goal.
Related Titles
By Naomi Shihab Nye
