Compare Carol Ann Duffys Valentine to Andrew Marvells...

Compare Carol Ann Duffys Valentine to Andrew Marvells To His Coy Mistress In this assignment I will be comparing two love poems Carol Ann Duffys Valentine to Andrew Marvells To His Coy Mistress. The poem Valentine was written is the twentieth century and in it the speaker uses onion as a metaphor to show her love. The poem To His Coy Mistress was written in the seventeenth century and is about the poet trying to persuade his Mistress to sleep with him. Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy is very different to any other love poem as you would expect to read something romantic, instead she writes about an onion. The poem is divided into four main stanzas and each stanza tells us something new about the relationship†¦show more content†¦She explains that she does not wish to be unkind. She is being realistic. Im trying to be truthful. Not a cute card or a kiss-o-gram she does not believe in giving commercial tokens of love like a card or a bunch of flowers. In the third stanza she gives the onion, I give you an onion- She uses a metaphor. Its fierce kiss will stay on you lip the bitter taste on an onion remains on a persons lips. The memory of a kiss can stay with one forever. Possessive and faithful as we are, for as long as we are She suggests that love affairs only last for the time that two people are interested in each other or it could mean till they die. The fourth stanza carries on with the extended metaphor as she insists that he accepts her gift Take it. She compares the loops of an onion to a wedding ring and implies that marriage can deaden love and passion. Marriage is lethal in her opinion. In the extended metaphor she expresses her feeling, sometimes people never recover from a broken romance. They will continue to experience heartache, pain, bitterness. Its scent will cling to your fingertips, cling to your knife. The repetition of the word cling is effective. The word knife conveys the image of a wound. The poet has obviously been hurt in previous relationships. As we just saw above the title of the poem is Valentines and we first expect it to be a romantic poem but as we read on we see that it had