Valentine's Day
Out-write the greeting card: make the world's most commercial day say something true.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about Valentine's Day: love beyond the card, with craft techniques, cliches to avoid, exercises and prompts in this free guide by Writory.
What this theme is
Valentine's Day is the only theme where the poet's chief rival is a shop. The day arrives pre-written: roses, red hearts, rhymes older than the postboxes they were mailed through. So a Valentine poem faces a sharper version of the love poem's usual problem. It must say something true about a particular love on the exact day when everyone is saying the same things about love in general. The theme, at its core, is the fight between real intimacy and its mass-produced costume.
That fight is a gift, not a handicap. The clichés give you something to push against, and pushing is where the poem's energy comes from. There is also the day's shadow side: the single person walking past the flower stalls, the couple whose card feels like paperwork, the widow with a drawer of old valentines. All of it belongs to the theme.
Why poets return to it
Poets take on Valentine's Day precisely because the ground is so worn; original footprints show up better in trampled snow. It is the best single exercise in avoiding inherited language that the calendar offers. Writory's judges, scoring for creativity, emotion, structure, language and theme, see more predictable poems in February than any other month, which means a genuinely fresh valentine has never had less competition where it counts.
Where it comes from
The day owes its romance to a poet. Chaucer's 'Parliament of Fowls', written in the 1380s, imagined all the birds choosing their mates on Saint Valentine's day, and the tradition of love-notes followed. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet counting the ways of love became the day's unofficial scripture, endlessly quoted and rarely matched for sincerity. In the modern era Carol Ann Duffy's famous anti-valentine offers the beloved an onion instead of a rose, its fierce light and its sting standing for love more honestly than a red satin heart; that poem taught a generation how to write against the card and toward the truth.
The lesson across six centuries: the valentine survives by reinvention.
The elements that carry it
- The unexpected gift-object, an onion, a spare key, a repaired umbrella, replaces the rose and instantly announces a poem thinking for itself.
- Paper things, cards, envelopes, a name written carefully, carry the day's old postal tenderness.
- February itself, cold, grey, the least romantic month, gives you weather to set real warmth against.
- Red handled ironically or sparingly, one red thing in a grey scene, works harder than a poem soaked in it.
- Small domestic evidence of long love, two cups, a shared coat, socks on a radiator, outweighs any bouquet.
Techniques that work
- Begin by banning the standard props, rose, heart, Cupid, forever, then write the valentine with what remains; scarcity will force invention.
- Choose one gift-object that is true to your specific love and build the whole poem as its presentation, half-explanation, half-dare.
- Address the you directly and include one unflattering, affectionate truth; the flaw is the proof of close attention.
- Write the anti-valentine that becomes a valentine: start in refusal of the day's clichés and let real feeling ambush the poem near the end.
- If you use rhyme, slant it, or your poem will chime like the cards it is trying to out-write.
Mistakes to avoid
- Roses are red logic: any line that could appear in a supermarket card must go, however comfortable it feels.
- Rhyming love with dove and above, or moon with June. If the rhyme arrived before the thought, send it back.
- The flawless beloved. Perfection is the card's job; the poem's job is the crooked laugh, the appalling taste in films, the exact way they say your name.
- Forgetting the day's outsiders. A valentine that acknowledges loneliness, its own past or someone else's, gains depth the purely happy version cannot reach.
An exercise
List five objects in your home that a stranger would never call romantic. Pick the least promising one and write a fourteen-line poem offering it to someone you love, explaining, without using the word love, why it is the truthful gift.
A challenge
Write two poems for the same person: the valentine the card shop would sell, deliberately clichéd, and the valentine only you could write. Read them side by side and note exactly which details make the second one alive; those details are your style.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem set at a flower stall at 6 p.m. on the fourteenth of February, from the point of view of the last unsold bunch of roses watching who buys and who only looks.
Before you submit
- No roses, hearts or Cupids unless they are being actively subverted.
- The central image or gift belongs uniquely to this relationship.
- One unflattering, affectionate detail proves the speaker has really looked.
- Any rhyme is slant or surprising, never automatic.
- The ending gives an image or action, not a declaration the card shop already sells.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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