Valentine

Wendy Cope’s “Valentine” accommodates the traditional themes of love poetry while hinting at 21st-century perspectives. In eight short lines, the reader gets a slim view of a cagey speaker, one who both seems adept enough to execute complex poetic technique, but who also expresses crushing self-doubt. Line 2, repeated as Line 8 as the poem’s final statement, shows possible regret: “I’m afraid it’s you.” The speaker certainly seems to acknowledge that the intended audience for the confession of love will not be happy and almost certainly will not return the speaker’s affection. Even if the speaker doubts her own appeal—or at least any desirable qualities in the form of her affection—she selects her beloved with an almost weary resign: “[N]ext year will do” (Line 6) if the beloved’s defenses must be worn down over time. This promise of eventual capitulation stands at the threshold of consent and its definition. This superficially innocuous “Valentine” becomes a warning to the beloved: ready yourself because “my heart has made its mind up” (Lines 1,4, and 7). Resistance to this speaker’s advances only delays the inevitable. Cope’s poems often adopt a tone of bewildered resignation. “Valentine” relies on the reader’s judgment and intuition to decide whether this speaker comes from a place of remorse and shy contrition, or from a more sinister, manipulative kind of resolve. The speaker may beseech for mercy, placing herself at the feet or in the hands of the beloved in abject Petrarchan worship. Alternately, this speaker may be following the carpe diem tradition seen in poems like Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” in which the suitor reminds the object of desire that death comes for us all, portraying the yielding to desire as a kind of forestalling of eventual, inevitable decay.

“Valentine” works on multiple levels, pleasing a casual reader with a clever, solicitous love declaration and challenging the reader who sees a broader historical and literary context in its central theme: love and romantic power. Cope’s personal life might shed some light on the poem’s nuance. She married her partner, poet Lachlan McKinnon, after almost 20 years together. Unable to obtain a civil partnership, they married in an official ceremony under some duress. The couple enjoys being married, Cope says, but she still bristles that no simpler option was available to them. In 2014, she told The Guardian that they should have had a choice about how to be legally connected without the ornament of a ceremony. Her sensitivity to the rules, habits, and framing of relationships provides context for the ambiguity in “Valentine.” The poem raises questions about relationship dynamics that the poet leaves intentionally unanswered in the mind of the reader. Over in a moment, the reader must evaluate the quality of what the speaker offers, considering the positive and destructive power of excessive, inescapable passion. In her real life, Cope advocates for choice in relationships and their structure. In this poem, her speaker offers no choice.