Compare and contrast Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 and Liz Lochhead’s ‘I wouldn’t

thank you for a valentine”

The conventional love poem exaggerates their lover’s beauty to express their love; however
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 and Liz Lochhead’s “I wouldn’t thank you for a valentine” are poems
which do not abide by the love poem criteria. They are the antithesis of typical romance poems;
Shakespeare goes in great detail to explain that his love is not as perfect as the beauty of nature
as Petrarch, a love poet at the time, compares his love to all the extensive beauty of nature.
Similarly Lochhead prefers to be told that her lover is in complete love with her rather than him
indulging in buying typical valentine gifts and sweets. The poems have basically the same
meaning which is to make sincere declarations of true love to their lover.
During the 20th century a well acknowledged poet by the name of Petrarch began writing poems
which had sent a revolution through the 20th century. In his poems he compared his wife to
extreme beauty of nature and things which were abnormal such as angels. Shakespeare, who was
against this type of terminology, wrote a sonnet which was the contrary to Petrarch. In his
sonnet, he gave an example of an expression used by Petrarch, and then he compared it to his
own mistress and said that his mistress was nothing as extraordinary as the beauty of nature that
Petrarch but said he loved her even so.
Another poet who was infuriated by the fact that men fooled their wives into believing that they
loved them so much was Liz Lochhead. In her poem she explains how uninterested the
commercial Valentine’s Day has become. She uses extreme words to portray how much she hates
the typical Valentine gifts and tedious cards. Says uses the idea of a statement that is said and
then says how drearily she react if it was said to her. She showed no care about expressing her
thoughts and sounded like the Valentine’s Day was wrong in all its attributes.