Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Valentine” is a short little love poem. He’s good at rhyming and rhythm
and description. It’s a Valentine - a traditional love poem. Still, this work stands apart from more
conventional examples of this genre because of the peculiar mode and insight of Poe.
The rhyming scheme of the poem is AABB in each of the four stanzas. This form makes the
work symmetrical and well-balanced, while its content is much more unsettling and melancholic.
Poe provides much vivid, imaginative imagery to describe the complicated and ambiguous
emotions of the speaker toward the addressee.
In the first stanza, the addressee is compared to a "shining star"; the metaphor conveys a
reverent, idealistic feeling. Then, in the second line, there is the introduction of a darker, more
obsessional note: "chained" to the addressee's "demon eyes." There is a sense of unease and
uncertainty invited by this change in tone that presages a troubled and passionate nature for the
speaker.
The contrasting romantic and macabre elements are continued through the final couple of
stanzas. Although it is confessed that the speaker's love for the addressee will never die, at the
same time, the former desires to be "buried" with the latter, which foreshadows some sort of
morbid, almost necrophilic connotation. Very vivid and visceral, the imagery on Poe's part—"a
bleeding heart" and "a gory shroud"—only underscores this unsettling, Gothic atmosphere even
more.
Overall, "A Valentine" reveals that Poe is at his best when writing a love poem against the grain
of the genre. The mingling of romantic and Gothic tones with an ambivalent, intricate emotional
pitch makes this work a thrillingly new input to Poe's brilliant poetic body.
Thank you.
Snigdha Joshi
XI-Humanities
