Valentine

Wendy Cope’s “Valentine,” from her second collection Serious Concerns (1992), balances technical virtuosity beneath conversational, vernacular language to create a deceptively simple poem. Cope’s poem is a triolet, which is a fixed form that traditionally utilizes strict requirements. Cope both embraces and parodies the form with heavy-handed rhyme, swinging meter, and mixed metaphor. Beneath the poem’s gleeful take on tradition and poetic devices, Cope conveys a bittersweet, apologetic sincerity that sets this work apart from both traditional and modern efforts at love declarations in poetry. “Valentine” exemplifies Cope’s unclassifiable poetic body of work as it demonstrates the playful, wry poetic voice that has made Cope popular among readers for decades.

Poet Biography

Contemporary English poet Wendy Cope’s work bridges the end of the 20th century through the beginning of the 21st with its sharp observation and criticism of popular culture and behavior, its raw examination of social anxiety and uncertainty, and its high burlesque of the pretensions of the art and academic worlds. Born in 1945 in Kent, Cope studied education and taught primary school for almost 20 years.

Cope’s career spans academic and popular contexts. During the 1980s and 1990s, she wrote about art and popular culture for several publications, including The Spectator magazine, where she was a television critic. Also during those decades, she wrote her first three volumes of poetry. Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986) and Serious Concerns (1992) brought Cope popular acclaim and media attention. Cope’s deft and wry verse charmed the public, but academic reviews dismissed her work initially as “comic” or “light” verse. In her next volume, If I Don’t Know (2001), Cope turned away from humor, but reviewers lamented the loss of edge in her poems.

After a decade-long hiatus, Cope returned to the literary world with Family Values (2011). She also returned to the deadpan humor and sharp observations of her earlier work while incorporating the compassion and subtlety of her more mature, mid-career poems. This collection earned Cope wider acclaim; critics began to look back with more interest at her command of formal technique, her astute understanding and subversion of literary convention, and her ingenuity with language. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1993 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995.

In 2011, the British Library acquired Cope’s archive, including her manuscripts and correspondence. Cope also received the honor of being named an Officer of the British Empire. She was not, however, named Poet Laureate, despite popular campaigns for her to succeed Ted Hughes in 1998 and Andrew Motion in 2009. Cope has claimed she does not desire the post and thinks it should be abolished. Coming from an iconoclast who rewrote T. S. Eliot’s landmark The Waste Land as a series of haiku, this claim may or may not constitute an elaborate joke.

Poem Text

Cope, Wendy. “Valentine.” 1992. Poemhunter.

Summary

“Valentine” offers an eight-line love confession, one that stumbles and repeats itself as the speaker struggles with self-doubt and unrequited passion. At the same time, the poet executes a complex form with witty linguistic turns and inventive poetic devices. The first line of “Valentine” portrays the speaker as resolute though unsteady, mixing up heart and mind metaphors for an impossible physical situation: “my heart has made its mind up” (Line 1). The suitor in this valentine appears to be as awkward as they come, eliciting some sympathy from the reader. Building on the unfortunate opening, the speaker apologizes in the second line, admitting “I’m afraid it’s you,” as if certain this news cannot be welcome (Line 2). A reader already aware of triolet form knows both these embarrassing statements will have to be repeated as the closing lines of the poem, promising more cringing anxiety to come. True to triolet form, the third line expands and reinforces context by acknowledging the beloved (or reader) might have other plans. But the fourth line repeats the first, countering those plans with the speaker’s determination. The fifth and sixth lines escalate again, raising the possibility that the inevitable selection of the beloved might be delayed upon meeting resistance, but not dissuaded entirely. The repetition of Lines 1 and 2 as Lines 7 and 8 both fulfills the form and cements the speaker’s commitment to the beloved.