In “Of the Valleys,” Hans Ostrom turns a familiar landform into an atlas of the inner life. The poem’s “you” is not a specific person but a position the reader steps into, so each of us becomes a traveler whose past is a chain of low places—some fertile with memory, others buried under ice. The central idea is that identity is not a single peak but a hollowed, inhabited terrain: shaped by passages, choices, losses, and imagined alternatives. Valleys are not merely scenery; they are where a self happens.
The poem’s open free verse moves with the uneven rhythm of recollection. Ostrom avoids regular meter and rhyme, but the language has its own sound-patterns: “mystique deepens like loam,” “mind’s climate,” “meadowed ease,” “mass humanity,” “stucco, steel,” “smile stiff like wax.” These pairings create texture without locking the lines into a fixed tune. Enjambment does much of the work, pushing the reader over line breaks as if descending from one thought into the next: “you passed through replaced / themselves in memory,” “anonymous / mass humanity,” “from 30,000 / feet.” The line breaks themselves enact the dips and slides the poem describes.
Much of the poem’s force comes from its shifting imagery. Memory is geological: one valley’s “mystique deepens like loam,” while a “glacier of forgetting” moves into others, suggesting that forgotten experiences may not be gone permanently but only frozen, waiting for the “mind’s climate” to change. Then the imagery becomes social and surreal in the train vignette. The speaker recalls entering a valley by train, seized by “a pleading wish to be from that valley,” a wish “not be you.” That phrase compresses a moment of self-alienation: the desire to belong somewhere else is also a desire to stop being oneself. The theft of the baggage—while the traveler stays on board—deepens the idea. A thief takes the suitcase and later becomes mayor; the suitcase “withers in his attic.” The stolen identity, or the abandoned possible life, prospers without its original owner, while the traveler keeps moving with only the wish.
The poem then broadens into a compressed survey of what humans seek in low places. Ostrom writes that “you variously hunted and gathered / education, work, sex, circuses, and solace,” turning modern life into primal foraging through valleys. Some valleys are only routes—highways, trails, rail beds—seen from thirty thousand feet, where they lose texture and become patterns, just as memory flattens some experiences into outlines. Others are “virtual valleys,” smeared with concrete, stucco, steel, neon, smoke. The cozy ones can be the most disturbing: a too-perfect white steeple sits above a waitress whose “eyeballs were hopeless / and hard, her smile stiff like wax.” The ideal surface and the deadened human face undercut any easy nostalgia for small-town charm.
The closing lines gather the metaphor into a quiet resolution: “Valleys have hollowed out a self’s / terrain, invited settlers, sustained crops / of possibilities in shadows of the peaks.” Here the self is both landscape and farmer, shaped by erosion and cultivation. The poem matters because it avoids the cliché of life as a climb toward a summit. Instead, it finds meaning in the low, ordinary, sometimes artificial or painful places where desires, memories, and abandoned selves are stored. Its second-person voice makes the map feel at once intimate and shared, asking each reader to consider which valleys have hollowed and filled them.