Valentine — Carol Ann Duffy (1993)

Carol Ann Duffy's Valentine, published in her 1993 collection Mean Time, is one of the most frequently set modern love poems in English. Duffy — who later became the UK's Poet Laureate (2009–2019) — writes here a deliberate anti-Valentine: she refuses roses, cards, satin hearts and all the commercial paraphernalia of February 14th, and offers her lover an onion instead.

The poem has divided readers for decades. It is a love poem — insistently so — but one that refuses to be easy. Duffy's onion is tender, real, and at several moments explicitly dangerous. The poem is interested in what romantic cliché hides and what an honest gift between lovers might actually be.

Context

Aspect	Detail
Poet	Carol Ann Duffy (1955–)
Collection	Mean Time, 1993
Period	Contemporary
Form	Free verse, irregular stanzas
Setting	Implied domestic; Valentine's Day

Duffy's work often revises canonical subjects — she has rewritten myths (The World's Wife), written about female experience in forms dominated by male tradition, and pushed back against poetic clichés. Valentine sits in that project. It is in dialogue with the tradition of male love poetry running from Shakespeare through Byron.

Short summary

The speaker offers her lover an onion instead of conventional romantic gifts. She explains, line by line, why the onion is the right gift: it is like the moon wrapped in brown paper; it promises light like the careful undressing of love; it will make the lover cry; its scent will linger; it is "fierce" and "possessive" and "lethal". She insists, at several points, that she is being "truthful" — that the onion is a real and honest emblem of love as it actually is.

Voice and speaker

The speaker is first-person, addressing the lover directly. The tone is combative, intimate and deadly serious. Duffy's speaker is not sentimental; she is not romantic in the soft sense; she is, instead, insistent. The imperative mood — "Take it", "Here" — controls the poem.

The addressee is silent, but not absent. The addressee is someone who expected a different kind of gift and is being shown a truer one.

Form and structure

Feature	Detail
Form	Free verse
Stanzas	Irregular — some very short, even single lines
Rhyme	None
Key device	Extended metaphor (onion = love)
Movement	Offer → description → insistence → warning

graph TD
  A[Not a red rose or a satin heart] --> B[I give you an onion]
  B --> C[Moon wrapped in brown paper]
  C --> D[Promises light; the careful undressing of love]
  D --> E[Will blind you with tears]
  E --> F[Fierce kiss; scent that clings]
  F --> G[Possessive, faithful]
  G --> H[Lethal]

Free verse is crucial here. Duffy rejects the ordered forms of earlier love poetry — the sonnet, the balanced stanza — because those forms carry ideological weight. They imply that love is orderable. Duffy's onion cannot be contained in fourteen lines of pentameter, and her poem refuses to pretend it could be.

Short lines — "I give you an onion." "Here." "Lethal." — punctuate the poem like verdicts. The white space around them enforces weight.

Language and imagery

The onion as extended metaphor. The entire poem is a sustained comparison. Layers of the onion are layers of love; the brown paper is ordinary and unglamorous; the shine is like a moon. The tears the onion brings are real, not symbolic.

Imperatives. "Take it", "Here". The speaker does not ask; she presents. Love in this poem is a gift pushed across the table.

Register of honesty. "I am trying to be truthful" — the explicit statement of the poem's purpose. The truth-claim is itself a gesture against the artifice of Valentine's Day.

Escalating danger. "Fierce kiss", "possessive", "cling", "knife", "lethal". The poem moves from tenderness to warning. Love in Duffy's account is capable of harm. This refusal to romanticise is central to the poem.

Anti-commercial framing. The opening line rejects specific Valentine's Day clichés — "red rose", "satin heart", later "cute card or kissogram". The poem is positioning itself against an entire industry.

Themes

Theme	How it operates
Honest love	The poem insists love must be described truthfully, not prettified
The failure of cliché	Red roses and satin hearts cannot say what the speaker wants to say
Love as risk	Love clings, cuts, can be "lethal"; honest love admits danger
Power in a relationship	The imperative mood stages a speaker giving and a lover receiving
The body of love	Tears, scent, kiss — love is embodied, not abstract

An important reading: the onion is not an anti-love image. It is a pro-love image. Duffy is arguing that love is better represented by something real, even if that something stings, than by something conventionally beautiful that says nothing.

Suggested comparison partners

Partner	Shared ground	Productive contrast
Sonnet 116	Both attempt to define true love	Shakespeare abstracts; Duffy embodies
I Wanna Be Yours	Contemporary, domestic imagery for love	Cooper Clarke wants to serve; Duffy wants to tell the truth
Love's Dog	List poem of love's contradictions	Hadfield fragments; Duffy commits to one metaphor

Worked paragraph

Both Duffy's Valentine and Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 define love against the grain of cliché, but they arrive at opposite conclusions about what the true definition requires. Shakespeare elevates love into the cosmological — "an ever-fixed mark", "the star to every wandering bark" — and frames the definition as a formal argument in a sonnet whose rhyme scheme and couplet enact the control his love claims. Duffy does precisely the opposite: she abandons traditional form, writes in free verse and short imperatives — "Take it." "Here." — and offers an onion, specifically because nothing abstract will do. Where Shakespeare insists that love "is not Time's fool", Duffy insists that love is embodied, "fierce" and "possessive", capable of "a fierce kiss" and of "lethal" harm. Both poems reject the "red rose" tradition, but Shakespeare reaches upward to principle while Duffy reaches downward to the kitchen table. Across four centuries they agree that love's real definition is worth arguing about; they disagree about whether the argument can be won with abstractions.

Key quotations to memorise

• "Not a red rose or a satin heart" — the opening rejection; sets the anti-cliché frame.
• "I give you an onion" — the gift; the extended metaphor begins.
• "It is a moon wrapped in brown paper" — transfiguration of the mundane.
• "It will blind you with tears / like a lover" — the image of love as involuntary weeping.
• "Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips" — love as lasting trace.
• "Lethal" — the single-word ending; the warning.

Extended worked paragraph — comparison with Love's Dog