The speaker lists what she loves and hates about love in a run of surprising pairings, from medicine and fairy tales to the laundry and a pirate's parrot.
How Hadfield's unexpected nouns, medical, magical, domestic and piratical, and the contrast of love and hate show love as both delightful and harmful.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'What I love about love is its diagnosis', 'What I hate about love is its prognosis', 'its me me me', 'its zookeeper – you', 'its truth serum', 'its shrinking potion', 'What I loathe about love is its burnt toast and bonemeal', 'its bent cigarette', 'its sick parrot'.
Form: eight couplets in which every line repeats the same sentence frame, a pattern broken once by loathe, with no punctuation and antithesis between love and hate.
Context: Jen Hadfield (born 1978), who lives in Shetland and whose collection Nigh-No-Place won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2008, making her its youngest woman winner; and the Eat me and Drink me labels from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Compares well with: i wanna be yours (list poems built on repetition), Valentine (love as both gift and harm), La Belle Dame Sans Merci (love that enchants and wounds) and Sonnet 43 (counting what love is).
