I Give You an Onion

At first glance, Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Valentine, seems to be a simple poem with a simple concept: love, at least in the eyes of the speaker, is like an onion. The poem tells the story of the speaker giving her significant other an onion for valentines day and shows her justifiying her gift, how it truly embodies the love between her and her lover. The speaker also criticizes the stereotypical gifts usually given during valentines day, saying how unlike an onion, it does not show the complexity or sincerity of love. In Valentine, Duffy prevails the multi-layeredness of love (pun not intended) in the eyes of the speaker and how she attributes the properties of an onion to those of the love between her and her lover by using structure and metaphors.

To illustrate what love means to her speaker, Duffy uses multidimensional metaphors that support and accompany her base metaphor: how love is like an onion. Duffy’s first usage of metaphor is surprisingly not the main one, how love is like an onion, but rather saying how her present isn’t one of the stereotypical gifts given on valentines day: “Not a red rose or a satin heart.” (Duffy 1). The speaker finds fault in these stereotypical metaphors for love, contrasting them with the onion, and showing how they do not symbolise what love really is: “Not a cute card or a kissogram./I give you an onion.” (Duffy 12,13). To help justify the speaker’s gift, Duffy incorporates metaphors to explain why an onion is the perfect symbol for love. For example in the second stanza, Duffy compares the onion both physically and metaphorically to the moon: “It is a moon wrapped in brown paper./It promises light” (Duffy 3,4). Physically, they are both spherical and only show their bright centers when somet...

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...carry a lot of weight with them. The usage and repetition of the structural devices not only help the speaker explain to her love why she chose an onion as a gift, but also makes the poem as a whole a lot more compelling and interesting to read.

The complexity of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Valentine, is not hidden in its essence, the comparison of love to an onion, but in the way she illustrates and supports her metaphors. Through the usage of both literary and structural devices, Duffy explores the meaning of love through the lense of her speaker, who, on valentines day, is trying to convey the true meaning of love through her symbol of choice: an onion. While her structure may seem unorthodox to some, her operation of both long, metaphorical sentences and short, stoccato ones makes the poem on one hand sweet and pleasurable to read and on the other, unnerving and sad.