AS WE approach St Valentine’s Day, I have noticed the usual flurry of online posts from “knowledgeable” Christians smugly correcting everyone else for misunderstanding St Valentine. “What”, they ask, “has this early Roman martyr, who was clubbed to death and beheaded, to do with all the cards, and flowers, the sentimental indulgences of Valentine’s Day?”

I always feel that, in this superior finger-pointing, this self-righteous pleasure in pulling the rug out from under other people’s pleasures and traditions, there is something of the same censorious and nit-picking spirit that led the Puritans to ban Christmas because there is no evidence that Jesus was born on 25 December.

Needless to say, I am entirely on the side of immemorial custom rather than the latest sceptical speculation, and, like all poets, my instinct is to “print the legend”.

It is true that there is no evidence of an association between St Valentine and romantic love until the 14th century, and it was, of course, a poet, our own Geoffrey Chaucer, who made the link, in The Parlement of Foules, composed in about 1375. The poem refers to 14 February as the day when birds (and people) come together to find a mate. When Chaucer wrote “For this was sent on Seynt Valentyne’s day, Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate,” he may have invented an excellent tradition.

But he may also have been right. Why should this martyr be the saint of love? Some of the early legends seem very apt for just such an association: that he healed his jailer’s blind daughter, and sent her a message signed “your Valentine”; that, as a priest, he defied the order of Emperor Claudius and secretly performed Christian weddings, allowing the husbands involved to escape conscription into the pagan army.

This legend claims that soldiers were sparse at that time; so this was an inconvenience to the Emperor, and, of course, a way of resisting the whole odious imperial agenda. The same account mentions that, “to remind them of their vows and God’s love, Saint Valentine is said to have cut hearts from parchment”, giving them to these couples as a memento not only of their love for each other, but of the love of Christ, whose own heart was pierced for them.

In the end, I thought that the best way to answer the naysayers was to take a leaf out of Chaucer’s book, and write a poem of my own:

St Valentine

Why should this martyr be the saint of love?
A quiet man of unexpected courage,
A celibate who celebrated marriage,
An ageing priest with nothing left to prove,
He loved the young and made their plight his cause.
He called for fruitfulness, not waste in wars,
He found a sure foundation, stood his ground,
And gave his life to guard the love he’d found.
Why should this martyr be our Valentine?
Perhaps because he kept his covenant,
Perhaps because, with prayer still resonant,
He pledged the Bridegroom’s love in holy wine,
Perhaps because the echo of his name
Can kindle love again to living flame.