elling her lover what to do. She is the one in control. She doesn't even need to use more than one or two words.|
|She refers to physical love 'the careful undressing of love' is tender, 'its fierce kiss' more passionate.|
|The blank tone comes from starting with rejecting conventional symbols, 'Not a red rose', and from the short, dismissive half of a sentence she uses, with its final full stop at the end.|
|She doesn't sound like she'd put up with any arguments.|
|She says that too much commitment and possessiveness can kill a relationship: `'a wedding-ring if you like. Lethal.|
|The line 'I give you an onion' is a statement. It is delivered in a matter-of-fact, deadpan way. But afterall, an onion seems a fairly unromantic symbol of love.|
|The poet is being comic, yet serious, is surprising the lover, and reader, and is making no apology or excuse for her behaviour!|
Perhaps in the final line there is also a more humble tone:
'Its scent will cling to your fingers cling to your knife.'
Could 'Your knife,' in terms of a relationship, be what the lover might do to hurt the poet? And despite that she'd still 'cling' on?
Perhaps, then, she isn't so confident in the end.
Traditionally love poems are written in the form of the Sonnet. The Sonnet is the standard form and was used famously by Shakespeare.
This poem is not a sonnet.
Moreover the form of the poem is irregular:
The lines are of varied length and the rhymes come in unusual places, to stress a particular word, such as 'lethal'.
Why then does Duffy come up with her own form?
|This is a wonderful, original, clever love poem. In it Duffy rejects cliched ideas of love and expresses how her love is:|
|Original, clever, intense, romantic, emotional, truthful, fierce, possessive, faithful, free and dutiful.|
|The tone of the poem is genuine, confident, seductive, intimate, and at the end pulls away to sound a note of warning and seems to admit some weakness.|
|Duffy manages to make the poem sound like a spoken voice, despite the fact that she uses structures it around an elaborate and imaginative extended metaphor. A difficult feat to pull off!|