Poems
Poem 2: 'Valentine'
Extract
Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
Location
The poem is filmed in a kitchen because Duffy was in her own kitchen when she received the phone call from a radio producer asking her to write a 'highly original' poem for Valentine's Day. Having accepted the commission and spent the fee, she found herself in her kitchen with a looming deadline, staring at a basket of onions.
Summary
'Valentine' comes out of a series of careful observations of the characteristics of an ordinary object - an onion - 'It is a moon wrapped in brown paper'. Characteristics of the onion are compared to the actions and feelings of people in love - 'it will make your reflection / a wobbling photo of grief'. The poet is 'trying to be truthful', and an onion seems to her to be a more appropriate symbol for Valentine's Day than the usual sentimental gifts - 'Not a red rose or a satin heart...'.
The choice of an onion for a meditation on love and relationships, like the stealing of a snowman in 'Stealing', is dazzlingly 'original', a dramatic tour de force characteristic of the way Duffy's poetry seems to refresh the reader's own way of seeing the world.
What Carol Ann Duffy Said
'Poetry very often is intellectual or emotional - and then you find the images - but this time actually I was holding the image.
'In some ways it's the reverse of how you normally write... normally you would say... a lover will make you cry like an onion does, but (in this poem) the onion makes you cry like a lover does...
'I'm sure most people have happy marriages, but it was true for me at the time of writing the poem that I associated marriage or living together with... death.'
Carol Ann Duffy - Passwords 1998
