Valentine
Commentary
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not a red rose The poem makes explicit what any poem must do: make it new (Ezra Pound's phrase) - a poem has to take the most common experiences - of love, desire, betrayal, etc - and reclothe them in fresh phrases.  This is not only to be 'original'; more importantly, the 'promise' of a poem to its reader is that this new phrasing, this new imagining, will get closer to the 'truth' of the situation, what it really feels like.  Any poem is a revision of those poems which have gone before it; this poem takes, if you like, the most hackneyed theme - love -, and the most hackneyed format - the 'poems' which appear in St Valentine's Day cards - and tries to re-imagine them in the service of 'truth'. ('I am trying to be truthful').
Perhaps the relative 'obviousness' of the poem's aim - doing what all poems do, but more explicitly than most - makes the poem feel a bit 'programmatic', a bit self-conscious in its 'originality'?  That judgment is properly for each individual reader to decide.
I give The poem's basic structure is based on the presentation of a gift: the description of the gift ( I give..); the actual offering ( Here.); the moment of it passing from hand to hand ( Take it.).
Its 'revision' of earlier poems, of what might be expected, is in the form of the gift offered.  (And what is being offered, represented by the onion? - both love, and the knowledge of what 'love' is - its combination of both pleasures and pains, both - though opposite - equally intense and unavoidable.)  The gift will avoid the 'sentimental' simplifications of the conventional gifts (and the conventional poems) - a red rose or a satin heart - ; these would make the experience just simply 'sweet'.  The poem's choice of 'gift' will avoid the sweetness; it's more pungent and complex than that!
And by the end of the poem, the 'gift' will imply a kind of difficulty in reaching a decision: is it a gift 'you' (the addressee in the poem, the reader beyond it) really wants? 
(Except, of course, there's an irony in the whole set-up of 'love' being offered: we tend to fall in love, whatever our intentions - it's not something that really can be accepted or refused: it just happens.)
an onion There's a deliberate baldness and shock in the naming of the gift.  The reader is intended to be surprised.
The rest of the poem will work through and show the appropriateness of the comparison of Love to an onion - in terms of its pungency, its ability to bring tears to the eyes, its contrast to conventional 'sweetness'.
The poem's choice of a deliberately, almost grotesquely, surprising comparison, and the poem's working through of that comparison - almost as a kind of implicit 'argument' to convince the reader of that appropriateness - might remind the reader of the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century, with their use of the 'conceit'.  Duffy seems to me to drawn to a similar combination of the intellectually and emotionally intense - alert to both ideas and bodies - which characterises the work of a poet like John Donne.
(The use of an onion to carry 'heavy' meanings is not unknown elsewhere.  In the verse play Peer Gynt by the 19th century playwright Henrik Ibsen, Peer strips an onion while comparing its various layers to the stages of his life.  The point is that he is trying to find the 'essence' of himself - and of course, there is no such 'essence', no central core:
    What an incredible number of layers!
       Don't we get to the heart of it soon?
            [He pulls the whole onion to pieces}
      No, I'm damned if we do.  Right down to the centre there's nothing but    layers - smaller and smaller.....Nature is witty!
The poem also has that sense of bottomless 'complexity', undecidability - that life is a question without an answer, that Nature as it were sets a 'problem' without deigning to provide a solution.
(There's also 'Glass Onion' by John Lennon on The White Album by the Beatles, while we're on the subject of onions in literature.)
moon wrapped in brown paper The initial point is visual: the luminous white of the onion wrapped by the dull brown of the outermost covering.  But the comparison is also richer than this: through the metaphor, Love promises both the 'romantic' idealisations promised by the conventional poems (and think how often in 'sentimental' poems and songs the moon crops up) - but also it exists here in a 'realistic', domestic, everyday context; it is both banal and intense.
(Throughout the poem its central 'strategy' is to look for the combination of discrepant elements in Love - the avoidance of simplifications.)
careful undressing of love This - and the line before it - have some conventional delicacy, some conventional 'romanticism'.  The association of love with light appears elsewhere in Duffy's poems (for example, First Love )  Also - as elsewhere - love is always presented as both an emotional and physical, sensual experience.
The delicacy here, though, will develop and change in the poem - by the penultimate verse, the 'careful undressing' will have become a 'fierce kiss'.
blind you with tears The second point of the comparison - and perhaps the most obvious: onions make you cry, so does love.
a wobbling photo of grief Similar ranges of ideas, associations of image, appear in First Love .  The photo wobbles because it is being seen through tears.
I am trying to be truthful A line which works as a self-justification - in reply to an unspoken reaction on the part of the addressee to the second verse.  It's as though the addressee/reader would be shocked by the association of love and grief.  Perhaps it rather overstates that presumed shock - after all, plenty of popular songs make precisely such an association - but, tactically, this, and the dismissive 'cute' of what the poem sets up as the only alternative to its view, in the next line: Not a cute card or a kissogram - allows the poem to go on to be 'harder', more intense in the discrepancies it identifies as constituting the experience of Love.
I give you an onion A reprise - the repetition of the second line is made before the poem goes onto what it takes to be 'harder', less commonly acceptable 'truths' about love.  The reprise is like a fresh gathering of breath before a final, greater effort.
fierce kiss The third point of comparison: the pungency of taste of the onion is compared to the sheer intensity of Love.  This is more than the sometime unhappiness of unhappy love - which is all that the poem has so far used to revise the 'cute', sentimental simplifications.  It refers to the intensity of the compulsions, the shaking vividness of the memories (a running theme in the volume as a whole) produced, by the experience of Love.
stay on your lips Compare to as close to my lips as lipsticks in First Love .
possessive and faithful Note the combination of terms: one is normally taken to be critical, the other as admirable - both are asserted as unavoidable in, definitive of, the experience of Love.
Note also that both are normally assumed to be permanent, to last (they are defined by their continuance) - but they are compromised by the slightly cynical sounding last line of the verse: for as long as we are - which seems to imply: not long.  The experience of Love is both intense, but doubtful in its duration.
shrink to a wedding ring Fourth point of comparison: the small rings at the centre of the onion are visually compared to a wedding ring - light, shiny (platinum) and circular like a ring.
Note the critical implications in the word shrink: Love is much greater - in its intensity - to the rather formalised social arrangements of marriage.  If you like suggests a kind of insouciant permission - as though it is an irrelevant concession.
lethal What does 'lethal' refer to - the experience of Love in itself (and that would pick up the threat implicit in the last word 'knife'.), or the shrinkage of the experience and its intensity to the formality of marriage?
cling to your fingers The fifth point of comparison - much like the third: the onion's scent, its pungency.  Its point is its lasting impression (strong verb - cling - suggesting a kind of unavoidability, and a kind of desperation - stronger than the earlier, less striking stay on your lips, and the verb itself is repeated twice)
The phrase both suggests the inescapability of memory, and also more physical associations in its reference to fingers (a good enough example of how Duffy always touches upon a kind of physical, bodily intensity when writing on Love - there's little in her poetry which attempts to idealise Love away from bodies - as there is in Shakespeare sonnets, say.
knife The last line - picking up from 'lethal' - sounds more like a threat than a present.  A knife is 'natural' and harmless in its association with an onion - but it now carries over into something a little unplaced in its association with love - suggesting something of Love's ability to damage and hurt others (suggested in other poems in the volume, like Havisham and Adultery.)