Love Quote by Thomas Hood

A Victorian love line that dares to turn a calendar gimmick into a daily ethic. Hood’s “Oh” kicks the door in with theatrical urgency, but the real move is quieter: he reframes choosing someone as an ongoing action, not a one-time declaration. “If it be to choose and call thee mine” is less possessive flex than conditional vow. The speaker knows the phrase “mine” can sound like ownership, so he wraps it in “to choose,” making devotion consent-based and continually renewed. It’s courtship as practice, not conquest.

The punch is in the temporal twist: “every day my Valentine.” Valentine’s Day, even in Hood’s era, was a ritual of tokens and sanctioned sentiment, a brief holiday where feeling becomes socially legible. Hood leans into that cultural script only to outgrow it. The subtext is a gentle critique of performative romance: if love is only loud once a year, it’s basically public relations. True affection, he suggests, should be steady enough to make the holiday redundant.

Formally, the line works because it rides a wave of apostrophe (“thee”), endearment (“love”), and insistence (“every day”) that keeps narrowing the focus onto a single person. Hood, often remembered for wit and social bite elsewhere, lets sincerity take the mic here; still, he can’t resist a small rhetorical trick: he elevates a mass-market occasion into something intimate, private, almost defiant. In a culture increasingly commercializing sentiment, he insists on constancy over spectacle.