Key Quote
“"I give you an onion. / It is a moon wrapped in brown paper"”
Carol Ann Duffy · Valentine
Focus: “moon”
The onion as love token is startlingly unconventional — the 'moon' comparison elevates it to something romantic and luminous, while 'brown paper' keeps it grounded in honest, unglamorous reality.
Technique 1 — EXTENDED METAPHOR / CONCEIT
Duffy constructs the entire poem around an extended metaphor (or conceit — a surprising, elaborate comparison) in which an onion represents love. Like love, the onion has layers to be peeled back, can make you cry, leaves its scent on your fingers, and its 'fierce kiss' stays on your lips. The comparison is deliberately unconventional — Duffy rejects roses and chocolates in favour of a humble vegetable, arguing that honest love is messy, layered, and occasionally painful, not neat and commercially packaged.
The conceit works on multiple levels simultaneously. The onion's concentric rings represent the deepening stages of intimacy — each layer reveals more of the truth. Its ability to make people cry represents love's capacity to cause pain alongside pleasure. Its lingering scent represents how love marks you permanently — 'Its scent will cling to your fingers, / cling to your knife.' The final word, 'knife', introduces a note of menace, suggesting that love can become possessive and dangerous. Duffy's conceit thus captures love's full complexity in a single, perfectly chosen object.
Key Words
RAD — PROGRESS
The poem progresses from rejecting superficial expressions of love to offering something far more meaningful. It opens with negation — 'Not a red rose or a satin heart' — dismissing commercial Valentine's Day symbols as inadequate. It then moves through the onion metaphor with increasing intensity, from 'a moon wrapped in brown paper' (beautiful) to 'blind you with tears' (painful) to 'possessive and faithful' (obsessive). The progression reveals love as Duffy truly sees it: not a simple, sweet emotion but a complex, demanding force that grows more intense — and more dangerous — the deeper you go.
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Technique 2 — NEGATIVE SENTENCES AND IMPERATIVES
Duffy opens with negative sentences — 'Not a red rose or a satin heart', 'Not a cute card or a kissogram' — that function as declarations of what the poem refuses to be. This oppositional technique defines love by what it is not, clearing away sentimental cliches before the speaker can say what love truly is. The negatives carry a tone of impatience, even contempt, for the commercial Valentine's Day industry that reduces complex emotion to purchasable objects.
The poem's other dominant mode is the imperative: 'Take it', 'Here', 'Lethal'. These commands create an insistent, almost aggressive tone — the speaker is not asking the beloved to accept the onion but demanding it. The single-word stanza 'Here' functions as a physical gesture, thrusting the onion towards the reader/beloved with startling directness. This imperative voice suggests that honest love does not request permission — it presents itself and insists on being accepted on its own terms, layers, tears, and all.
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Context (AO3)
CAROL ANN DUFFY AND FEMINIST POETRY
Duffy was the first female and first openly gay Poet Laureate of Britain (2009-2019). Her poetry consistently challenges conventional representations of women, love, and relationships. 'Valentine' rejects the male-dominated tradition of love poetry — roses, sonnets, idealised women — and replaces it with a distinctly feminist voice that insists on honesty over romance, substance over surface, and equality over pedestals.
CHALLENGING COMMERCIALISED LOVE
The poem was published in 1993, during a period of increasing commercialisation of personal relationships. Valentine's Day had become a multi-billion-pound industry built on the idea that love can be expressed through purchased objects. Duffy's poem is a deliberate act of resistance against this commodification — by offering an onion instead of roses, she argues that genuine emotion cannot be bought, packaged, or made palatable. Real love, like an onion, is raw.
Key Words
WOW — BARTHES — LOVE AS FRAGMENTS, NOT GRAND NARRATIVE
Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1977) argues that love cannot be captured in a single, coherent narrative — it exists as a series of disconnected moments, sensations, and contradictions. Duffy's poem embodies this Barthesian approach: instead of telling a love story, she offers a series of fragmentary images and assertions — tears, light, scent, a knife — that capture love's contradictory nature without resolving them into a neat conclusion. The poem's free verse form, with its varying line lengths and sudden single-word stanzas, physically enacts this fragmentation. Barthes also argued that the dominant culture provides pre-packaged scripts for love (roses, hearts, happy endings) that prevent us from experiencing love authentically. Duffy's rejection of 'a red rose or a satin heart' is a rejection of precisely these cultural scripts — the onion represents love stripped of its manufactured packaging, experienced raw and unmediated.
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