Love: Structure & Language Techniques

“Love”: Structure

Enjambment: Duffy’s use of enjambment helps depict the flowing, fast-paced nature of love. This encouraging fluent reading aligns with the passionate qualities often attributed to love.
First-person Perspective: This poem is expressed in the first person, allowing the reader to have a deeply personal insight into the speaker’s feelings of love.
Sonnet Structure: Duffy structures “Love” as a sonnet, a traditional form often used to express romantic love. This references a larger tradition in poetry while bringing her own interpretation.

“Love”: Language Techniques

Sensory Imagery: The poem is rich with sensory imagery, engaging sight, smell, and touch. This aims to evoke the all-encompassing nature of love, which can entirely consume one’s senses.
Metaphors: Duffy employs metaphors to represent abstract feelings of love in a comprehensible manner. For example, “Love is a compass without a needle,” demonstrates love’s elusiveness and unpredictability.
Contrasts: The poem contains stark contrasts such as, “What can I give you? Nothing.” This captures the dichotomy of love; it’s an intangible feeling yet it demands everything.
Repetition: Duffy uses repetition—like “everything, everything”—to emphasise the intense feelings and consuming nature of love.
Lexical Field of Giving: The constant reference to giving presents, ““cards… tokens… balloons… love’s alphabet”, emphasises the poet’s yearning to adequately impart her love.

In conclusion, “Love” harnesses both structure and language to effectively portray the depth, complexity, and often contradictory nature of love as an emotion.