I Wanna Be Yours — John Cooper Clarke (1982)

John Cooper Clarke — always "the Bard of Salford" — emerged from the punk and post-punk scene of late-1970s Manchester as a performance poet. He opened for bands like the Sex Pistols and Joy Division; he recorded his poems over rock arrangements; his voice was fast, Mancunian, wry. I Wanna Be Yours, published in 1982, is one of his best-known pieces and was later set to music by the Arctic Monkeys in 2013, bringing it to a much larger audience.

The poem sits in the Edexcel cluster as a counterweight to the grander declarations of love elsewhere — Shakespeare's cosmic sonnet, Byron's starry comparisons. Cooper Clarke's speaker offers his lover a vacuum cleaner, a hoover, a Ford Cortina, an electric meter. The register is domestic, modern and unapologetic. And yet, for all its list-poem wit, the feeling at its centre is devotion.

Context

Aspect	Detail
Poet	John Cooper Clarke (1949–)
Date	1982
Period	Contemporary; punk/post-punk era
Form	List poem with repeated refrain
Setting	Implicit domestic; speaker addressing lover

Cooper Clarke's style draws on music-hall tradition, spoken-word performance, and the plain-voiced populism of earlier English light verse. His poems sound like they were written for the stage because they were. The rhythm is designed to be spoken, not only read.

Short summary

The speaker offers himself to his lover through a series of domestic-object comparisons. He wants to be her vacuum cleaner, breathing in her dust; her Ford Cortina, ferrying her around; her raincoat, keeping her dry; her dreamboat, her teddy bear, her setting lotion, her electric meter. Each stanza ends with the refrain "I wanna be yours". The cumulative effect is a declaration of complete, unpretentious belonging.

Voice and speaker

The speaker's voice is working-class, unflashy, warm. He is not trying to impress the beloved with cultural references. He is listing the things he would willingly be for her. The tone is earnest even as it is playful — the humour does not undercut the feeling; it sharpens it.

This is a devotional voice, but the devotion is domesticated. Cooper Clarke's speaker is not kneeling before a lady; he is offering to be her Ford Cortina.

Form and structure

Feature	Detail
Form	List poem / catalogue
Stanzas	Three stanzas of varying length
Refrain	"I wanna be yours" (end of each stanza)
Rhyme	AABB or ABAB couplets with some looser patterning
Metre	Trochaic / accentual, suited to performance

The list form is the poem's engine. Each item — vacuum cleaner, Ford Cortina, raincoat — is a small declaration. Accumulation is the meaning: the speaker's love is not one thing but many, and each item adds another everyday readiness to serve.

The refrain "I wanna be yours" anchors the stanzas. It is the chorus; it also makes clear that the individual comparisons are all variations on a single, simple point.

graph TD
  A[Stanza 1: vacuum cleaner, Ford Cortina] --> R1[I wanna be yours]
  R1 --> B[Stanza 2: raincoat, coffee pot, dreamboat]
  B --> R2[I wanna be yours]
  R2 --> C[Stanza 3: electric meter, heater, setting lotion]
  C --> R3[I wanna be yours]

Language and imagery

Domestic objects as love language. Vacuum cleaner, raincoat, teddy bear, coffee pot, electric meter. Cooper Clarke refuses the traditional symbols (rose, star, flame) and instead uses the objects of a 1980s working-class home. The implication is that love does not need exotic symbols to declare itself; it can be declared in the language of Monday morning.

The Ford Cortina. A specifically dated, specifically British reference. The Cortina was the mid-size family car of the era, unglamorous but ubiquitous. It roots the poem in real time and place.

Repetition and refrain. "I wanna be yours" is heard three times; each hearing is the same but the meaning accumulates. The refrain turns the poem into something close to a song.

Colloquial contractions. "Wanna", the casual register throughout — Cooper Clarke deliberately writes his speaker into a recognisably spoken voice. This is a poem to be heard.

Warmth of service. The images are not of dominance or possession. They are of usefulness. The speaker wants to be helpful — to keep the lover dry, warm, powered, ferried, comforted.

Themes

Theme	How it operates
Devotion as service	Love rendered as everyday usefulness
Anti-grandiosity	Refuses exalted imagery in favour of domestic objects
Working-class voice	The speaker sounds like an ordinary person, not a Romantic hero
Declaration	The refrain makes the poem a public statement of love
Humour as tenderness	The jokes are the love, not a distraction from it

A good reading notices that the poem, for all its lightness, is a genuine love poem. Cooper Clarke's speaker is not mocking. He is offering himself entirely, and the humour makes the offering bearable — and, in a way, more believable than the grand declarations that preceded it in the tradition.

Suggested comparison partners

Partner	Shared ground	Productive contrast
Valentine	Contemporary, anti-cliché approach	Cooper Clarke offers service; Duffy offers truth including danger
Sonnet 116	Declaration of love	Shakespeare elevates; Cooper Clarke grounds
Love's Dog	Honest, list-style contemporary love	Hadfield lists love's good and bad; Cooper Clarke lists only the offered

Worked paragraph

Both Cooper Clarke's I Wanna Be Yours and Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 are declarations of love that work by repetition and definition, but where Shakespeare elevates his subject into the cosmic, Cooper Clarke lowers his into the domestic. Cooper Clarke's speaker offers himself as "vacuum cleaner", "Ford Cortina", "raincoat" — a catalogue of 1980s household objects whose familiarity is the point; the refrain "I wanna be yours" at the close of each stanza makes the declaration both cumulative and performative. Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 works in iambic pentameter and closes on an elevated wager: "If this be error... I never writ, nor no man ever loved". Both poems use the resources of form — Shakespeare's sonnet, Cooper Clarke's list-plus-refrain — to give their feeling shape, but Shakespeare's love is abstract, absolute and public, while Cooper Clarke's is embodied, specific and intimate. Across four centuries, both poets agree that real love needs to be stated; they disagree about whether it should also be exalted.

Key quotations to memorise

• "Let me be your vacuum cleaner / Breathing in your dust" — opening image; devotion as breath-in-service.
• "Let me be your Ford Cortina / I will never rust" — the dated car reference; the promise of lastingness.
• "Let me be your raincoat / For those frequent rainy days" — protective service; British weather realism.
• "I wanna be yours" — the refrain; three repetitions across the poem.
• "Let me be your electric meter" — devotion as utility; the image is warm rather than satirical.
• "Let me be your setting lotion" — tenderness of shared grooming; intimacy of daily life.

Extended worked paragraph — comparison with Love's Dog