The speaker rejects the usual Valentine's gifts and offers an onion instead, as a truthful image of love that brings beauty, tears, possessiveness and danger.
How Duffy's extended metaphor of the onion, commands to the lover and blunt single words present love as truthful, intense, possessive and potentially dangerous.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Not a red rose or a satin heart', 'I give you an onion', 'It is a moon wrapped in brown paper', 'like the careful undressing of love', 'It will blind you with tears / like a lover', 'a wobbling photo of grief', 'I am trying to be truthful', 'Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips', 'Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring', 'cling to your knife'.
Form: free verse in stanzas of uneven length, one-line stanzas such as Here and Take it, a speaker addressing the lover directly, and an extended metaphor that darkens towards the last word.
Context: Carol Ann Duffy (born 1955), whose collection Mean Time (1993) won the Whitbread Poetry Award and who became the first woman Poet Laureate in 2009; and the Valentine's Day customs of flowers, cards and hearts that the poem rejects.
Compares well with: Sonnet 43 (contrasting declarations of love), i wanna be yours (unconventional images of devotion), 1st Date – She and 1st Date – He (truth and pretence) and Love's Dog (the pleasures and pains of love).
