And for those who are having trouble with the background bits:
true love and beauty (the usual) and behaded martyrs (like St Valentine, both or possibly all five of him), and poisoned chocolates (in this fabuouls play I read once that I can't remember what it was, but there were poisoned chocolates, and it was actually romantic) and dead birds in gilded boxes (there was a dead bird regarded as a token of a doomed love in one of the lais of Marie de France) and roses and nasty sugar hearts (I once had some sweet-tart style candy hearts, which were vastly better than the usual ones) and little saussages on sticks (which have nothing to do with valentine's day, acutally, but were served at the ball in the Cinderella mini-book in The Jolly Postman)
poem 1: so I really like this poem but does anyone know what on earth it's talking about? I assume Blake was not actually trying to write about cervical cancer...
poem 2: so despite the totally non-romatic image, and the fact that the 2nd stanza doesn't scan right, I was too ammused not to include it...
I don't know how it happened, but somehow I associate Valentine's Day with Victorian lace and Death. Which leads to some pretty strange valentines, such as this one...
yeah, yeah, yeah, enough of this valentine stuff, already...