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Relationships: modern voices on love

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Five modern poems in the Relationships cluster show love as awkward, devoted, honest, mixed and tested by war. These poems are still in copyright, so this lesson describes them in our own words. Use your anthology for the exact words you quote in the exam.

What each poem is about

1st Date: She and 1st Date: He (Wendy Cope): two linked poems about the same first date at a classical concert. Each person tells us their private thoughts. Both have pretended to like classical music more than they really do, and both worry about impressing the other. Only the reader sees both sides.
i wanna be yours (John Cooper Clarke): the speaker offers to become ordinary, useful things for the person he loves, such as a vacuum cleaner, a Ford Cortina car, a coffee pot, a raincoat and an electric meter. The title is repeated as a refrain.
Valentine (Carol Ann Duffy): the speaker refuses to give a traditional gift such as a red rose and gives an onion instead, explaining all the ways it is a truer symbol of love.
Love's Dog (Jen Hadfield): a list of pairs: what the speaker loves about love, then what she hates about it, over and over.
The Manhunt (Simon Armitage): a wife describes slowly exploring her husband's body and mind after he comes home injured from war, until she finally finds the deepest damage and can come close to him.

Themes and ideas

Honesty against cliché: Duffy rejects greeting-card romance. Her onion is honest about love: it can bring tears, it lingers and it can even become possessive and dangerous.
Pretending and performing: Cope's two speakers hide their real feelings to seem impressive, which makes us smile but also shows how hard it is to be honest at the start of a relationship.
Devotion in everyday life: Clarke finds love in practical, ordinary objects rather than grand gestures. Some readers find the speaker charming; others find his wish to be owned a little obsessive.
Mixed feelings: Hadfield shows that loving and hating love sit side by side, with no final answer.
Love that has to heal: Armitage shows love as patience. The wife's search is slow because war has damaged her husband's body and mind.
Good comparisons: Valentine with Sonnet 43 (honest versus idealised love); The Manhunt with One Flesh (closeness and distance in long relationships); 1st Date with Neutral Tones (the start and the end of love).

Methods and how to write about them

Cope: four-line stanzas with the second and fourth lines rhyming, a light comic rhythm, and dramatic irony, because we know what both people think.
Clarke: anaphora (he keeps asking to be allowed to be something), internal rhyme, lower-case title and non-standard spelling, which make it sound like spoken performance. Arctic Monkeys later set it to music on their album AM (2013).
Duffy: an extended metaphor (the onion), imperatives that push the gift at the lover, and very short stanzas, some of a single line, which make each statement blunt. It ends with a threatening image of a knife.
Hadfield: anaphora and pairs of lines, some linked by half-rhyme; surprising, sometimes odd images that refuse to settle into one view of love.
Armitage: thirteen couplets (pairs of lines, like a couple), metaphors of fragile or broken objects for each injury, and the image of a buried, unexploded explosive inside him for his trauma. A short phrase is repeated as she gets closer, slowing the poem down.
To write well: name the method, say exactly where it appears, then explain what it suggests about love. For example: 'The couplet form mirrors the married couple, but the slow pace shows how carefully she must approach him.'
Worked example

Plan a comparison: how is love presented as honest in Valentine and The Manhunt?

  1. Thesis: both reject a perfect, fairy-tale image of love; Duffy chooses honesty, Armitage shows love facing painful truth.
  2. Point 1 (ideas): Duffy's onion shows love can hurt and possess; Armitage's wife accepts her husband's physical and mental wounds.
  3. Point 2 (language): Duffy's single extended metaphor versus Armitage's series of metaphors for broken objects and the hidden mine.
  4. Point 3 (form): Duffy's short, blunt stanzas and imperatives versus Armitage's slow, steady couplets that move closer.
  5. Judgement: Duffy tells us love is honest; Armitage shows honesty in action, through patience.

Answer: Both poems present honest love that includes pain. Duffy states it boldly through one extended metaphor and blunt imperatives, while Armitage shows it gradually through couplets and metaphors of damage, so his honesty feels more tender.

Key idea

Cope: two hidden sides of a first date (dramatic irony). Clarke: everyday objects and a refrain. Duffy: the onion as an extended metaphor for honest love. Hadfield: paired lines of love and hate. Armitage: a wife's slow search through her soldier husband's wounds, in couplets.

The interactive lesson includes the diagrams for this topic.

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