Onion, Compass and Flea. These are images used by Carol Ann Duffy and John Donne in their poems on love, sex and marriage.
AI is the most sought-after tool during Valentine’s week — to write the perfect message, for innovative ideas to celebrate the day, and for suggestions on gifts. The flip side of the coin is that a couple of zoos have called for the broken-hearted to name cockroaches after their ex-lovers. Love has always been the bane and boon of mankind. And poetry has never existed without love-bites!
John Donne, a metaphysical poet, was revolutionary in his age with his poetic images. Many metaphysical conceits of the seventeenth century, in which the poet compares two dissimilar things, were his contribution. In ‘The Flea’, Donne proposes that since the flea has bitten both himself and his beloved, it is equal to a pre-consummated union before marriage.
John tries to convince his beloved to marry him, as the consummation has already been made possible with the flea-bite! To propose such a comparison was quite shaky in the seventeenth century when love was idolised and embellished on paper with roses and hearts.
In ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, he compares two lovers to a compass. The moving away of the lover, he claims, won’t shift their love, as long as his beloved stays in position. A modern reader cannot but see how the poet is erroneously fixed on the idea that the beloved has no option to move. But stay in place, for the lover to return.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Like John’s ‘stiff twin compasses’, Carol Ann Duffy, in her poem ‘Valentine’, uses the conceit of an onion. Its scent will cling to your fingers, / cling to your knife. The poet is honest when she speaks about the layers and layers of teary folds within a relationship, which is contrary to the depiction of love with smooth, satin hearts.
I am trying to be truthful.
Not a cute card or a kissogram.
I give you an onion. Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips, possessive and faithful as we are, for as long as we are.
The persona is also slightly in a commanding tone: “Here”, “Take it”. Very truthful, straight and direct, and no honey-talk. So, on this Valentine’s Day, what is your choice? Roses or Onions?
The writer is a poet, translator and assistant professor of English at BCM College, Kottayam