In Paris With You — James Fenton
In Paris With You — Situation and Voice
James Fenton’s In Paris With You gives voice to someone newly out of a painful relationship, drinking to blunt the hurt, who arrives in Paris with a new partner and flatly refuses to discuss love. The opening command — “Don’t talk to me of love. I’ve had an earful” — sets the poem’s defensive, comic tone: this speaker has been hurt and will not romanticise anything just yet.
He exaggerates his own suffering for comic effect, calling himself “one of your talking wounded”, “a hostage”, and, in Fenton’s own invented word, “maroonded”. These melodramatic claims sit oddly beside the fact that he is clearly enjoying himself: he admits he is “on the rebound” and does not “care where are we bound”, yet each of these stanzas lands on the same simple, satisfied claim — “I’m in Paris with you.”
The line “I’m in Paris with you” closes four of the poem’s five stanzas, working like the chorus of a song. It lets the speaker avoid the word “love” while still admitting he is happy: presence and place replace the vocabulary of romance he claims to distrust.
James Fenton and Context
James Fenton built a reputation on wit and directness rather than solemn romantic language, and In Paris With You shows exactly that instinct at work. Where readers might expect a love poem set in Paris to reach for grand, sentimental language, Fenton gives his speaker slang, comic rhyme and a string of excuses instead. The result is a love poem that keeps insisting it is not one.
Form and Structure
The poem is built from five stanzas of uneven length, held together by the repeated refrain. The short, simple final line of most stanzas — “I’m in Paris with you” — contrasts with the longer, more complicated lines that come before it, so each stanza feels like it settles, again and again, on the one fact the speaker is sure of.
Fenton’s rhymes are deliberately comic rather than elegant: “earful” chimes with “tearful”, and “wounded” is forced to rhyme with the neologism “maroonded” — a word Fenton simply made up to keep the joke going. This playful, colloquial register — “sod off to sodding Notre Dame” — runs through the whole poem and makes the speaker sound like he is talking, not performing romantic verse.
Language and Imagery
The middle stanza rejects the postcard version of Paris. The speaker asks, “Do you mind if we do not go to the Louvre”, wants to “say sod off to sodding Notre Dame”, and would rather “skip the Champs Elysées” altogether. Naming three famous landmarks only to dismiss all three in three short lines shows how little interest he has in tourism — the real subject of the poem is the person in front of him, not the city’s monuments.
Instead, the couple stay in “this sleazy / Old hotel room”, a space Fenton describes with unglamorous honesty: “that crack across the ceiling” and walls that are “peeling”. The imperfect room becomes the setting for real intimacy — “Learning who you are, / Learning what I am” — which matters more to the speaker than any grand Parisian view. By the final stanza, Paris has become a word for the beloved’s body: “I’m in Paris with your eyes, your mouth, / I’m in Paris with… all points south.”
For a poem chosen for the second, unseen part of the poetry question, the exact wording has to come from memory. Three short, quotable phrases carry the whole poem: “Don’t talk to me of love”, “sod off to sodding Notre Dame”, and the closing refrain “I’m in Paris with you.”
Themes: Rebound, Avoidance and the Present
In Paris With You explores love arriving too soon after heartbreak. The speaker is defensive because he has been hurt — “the mess I’ve been through” — and refuses to use the word “love” because it feels dangerous. Instead, he focuses entirely on the present: the hotel room, the crack in the ceiling, the person beside him. The poem suggests that happiness can exist in a single ordinary place and moment, even while old wounds are still raw.
The poem’s humour is a defence, not a lack of feeling. Jokes about being “a hostage” or “maroonded” let the speaker admit he is vulnerable without sounding sincere, and the anxious final question — “Am I embarrassing you?” — briefly breaks through the comic surface to reveal real uncertainty.
Comparing In Paris With You with Other Anthology Poems
The exam never asks you to compare two anthology poems directly — the comparison task always pairs your named poem with an unseen poem, and the second part asks about one other anthology poem on its own. Even so, comparing In Paris With You with other poems in the cluster sharpens the skills both tasks need and helps you choose a strong poem for the second part.
Liz Lochhead’s ‘I Wouldn’t Thank You for a Valentine’ shares Fenton’s comic, colloquial rejection of romantic convention. Both speakers use humour and repeated refusal — Lochhead’s title line, Fenton’s “Don’t talk to me of love” — to keep sentimentality at arm’s length while still revealing genuine feeling underneath.
Robert Browning’s ‘Now’ also fixes on a single present moment as the only thing that matters, but the tone differs sharply: Browning’s speaker reaches for ecstatic, spiritual language, while Fenton’s undercuts every serious moment with a joke.
June Jordan’s ‘Poem for My Love’ also addresses the beloved directly and lingers on physical closeness, giving you a useful contrast between Jordan’s calm, sensuous voice and Fenton’s nervy, defensive one.
Raymond Antrobus’s ‘The Perseverance’ also finds meaning in an unglamorous, “sleazy”-feeling setting rather than a conventionally beautiful one, though Antrobus uses that setting to explore family and heritage rather than romantic rebound.
For the comparison task, look for an unseen poem that also resists direct declarations of love, or that finds meaning in an ordinary setting rather than a grand one — either idea lines up closely with Fenton’s method. For the second part, In Paris With You is a strong choice precisely because its best lines are so short and quotable: the refrain and the landmark-rejecting list are both easy to recall accurately under exam conditions.