Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy is the most searched for Duffy poem on Google. The poem is a cyber space megastar and today I felt I would examine the poem again briefly to find out why it is so popular with students, teachers and general readers. The poem’s popularity sugggests that something about the poem works very effectively in engaging interest and that this interest seems to endure. Something must resonate with readers!
By contrast on a personal level, I don’t remember liking the poem particularly and I thought this lack of enthusiasm might be relevant to this short analysis today. I recall I used to find the poem a bit contrived in its poetic device of the ‘onion’ and too easily dismissive and cynical about the trials and tribulations of love.
The cynic as Oscar Wilde famously declared, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. As a man extensively taken in by the posturing, vacuous figure of Lord Alfred Douglas, (See Richard Ellman’s monumental biography) Wilde knew what he was talking about. Wilde’s tragic self destruction was the price he paid, for his fascination with some seductive ‘terrible eyes’ so brilliantly encapsulated by Duffy in her poem about Wilde, called Cafe Royal also analysed on this blog. However today, I am reading the poem again and as with all re-readings, finding something fresh and new! Human beings are as Kristeva announced and I translate here : ‘subjects in process’ . We are not finished until we die! So let’s look again at Carol Ann Duffy’s Valentine!
Valentine is a subversive reading of Valentine’s day kitsch. For as we know, Valentine’s Day is worth millions and encourages those in love, slaves to love or those just bound by the duties of love to spend money on these public displays of love. Shops overflow in pinks and reds two weeks before the day, a visual display a the more cynical amongst us, may see as more Gothic Grand Guignol than cute!
We are all at sea in terms of epigrammatic endearments that often belie the reality of relationships temporarily propped up by the scaffolding of expensive red squishy hearts, shortlived roses and cards promising eternal care.
Duffy in the poem archly embraces the challenge of writing a different sort of Valentine. She begins with a new context for love. She separates her valentine from the milions of others through the simplicity of her use of the adverb of denial, ‘not‘. We sit up and take notice of this promise of a new type of valentine.
The isolation of the line at the start of the poem, highlights its deliberate difference, and we await Duffy’s arch conceit. This conceit is delivered after the framing pause, through the bathetic declaration of the ‘onion’ as a gift. A simple familiar vegetable, unexotic and without any immediate connotations of ‘satin’ hearted ‘lurve’. This is clever but Duffy is too knowing a poet of emotion to just linger in that seductive region of mere ‘smartness’.
Duffy reclaims the poem from mere irony and bathos through the deployment of one of her favourite images and poetic friends: the moon. She brings in this reference to the moon, as something allusive and ambiguous in order to expand the poetic conceit and literally to make her readers THINK!
For the actual process of reading of the poem and its focus upon the unpeeling of the onion, mirrror the seduction of love itself. It suggests the very performative aspect of love and sex and even of getting to know anyone. For each idea involves a form of undressing or unveiling. And as we become involved in loving someone, we do feel this gradual unveiling of unfamiliarity as the stories and secrets of the beloved become familiar and all part of the knowingness of the romantic relationship.
Love is about sharing stories and swapping stories. It is about actively listening to the identity of the beloved being built through storytelling. This process is reciprocated as a means of getting to know the beloved and becoming more and more ‘in love’.
However as the poem also suggests as we journey through the literal unveiling of the onion, revelations too can be uncovered, calling into question how familiar we really are with the beloved’s character at all. Intimacy may have sharp edges. People who claim to love and care about each other, hurt each other. Relationships can take away your equilibrium, your peace of mind. Curiosity leads to suspicion and suspicions can be confirmed: look at Duffy’s Medusa too!
The rest of my analysis of this poem will be shortly avaliable as a Tusi Note. In the mean time look at the fascinating Tusi Note on Before You Were Mine.
Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.
Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.
I am trying to be truthful.
Not a cute card or a kissogram.
I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.
Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.
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