Sara Guslov 11A 23/09/12
English homework: ‘Valentine’, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Sonnet #18’ all address love and death hand in hand. Why do you think they do this?
William Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Sonnet #18’ and Caroline Duffy’s ‘Valetine’ all address love and death hand in hand. Caroline Duffy’s ‘Valetine’ addresses love as a temporary, yet possesive love and death as an emotional death in which love turns to hate. Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ addresses love as a youthful, consuming and almost possesive love and death as an emotional and physical death in which without the ‘love of their lives’ they have no reason to be alive. Shakespeares ‘Sonnet #18’ addresses love as an eternal and unconditional love which holds a place above all things, and addresses death as the only means to an end to that irrevocable love.
Caroline Duffy writes ‘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.’ This implies that her ‘fierce kiss’ is an experience that will stay with her lover as long as they both remain faithful and as loving as they have been, for as long as they are faithful and loving. This means that the death that is hand in hand with love is a death of the relationship and not the person himself. Duffy writes ‘Its scent will cling to your fingers, cling to your knife.’ This conveys that the one to destroy the relationship will be her lover, as the ‘knife’ is usually a symbol of anger, violence and potentionally death as it is her lover whom the knife belongs to. However, the connection between the onion and the knife, in which the smell of the onion will cling to the knife, could represent the love clinging to her lover even when he is violent or cruel as a knife can be. Caroline Duffy addressed love and death hand in hand in ‘Valentine’ to show that love has a beginning and an end, whether or not is it a physical death or emotional death or both. Duffy depicts that the destruction of a relationship would be in a knife that is in her words ‘lethal’, again depending on the knife being symbolic or real, it will end in violence and anger which leads to hate being the end of love.