Friday, 4 December 2009

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Anne Hathaway - Carol Ann Duffy

n her poem entitled ‘Anne Hathaway’, Carol Ann Duf-
fy adopts the persona of Shakespeare’s widow. The
introductory quote from Shakespeare’s will ‘Item I
gyve unto my wife my second best bed’ reminds us
that Shakespeare’s best bed was reserved for guests,
and that Anne inherited the one that she and her
husband slept in. This bed becomes the focus of the
fourteen-line poem.
In the opening two lines, Duffy uses a metaphor
to express the magic of the bed in which Shake-
speare made love to Anne: it was ‘a spinning world
/ of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas’. More
metaphors follow in lines three and four as Anne
Hathaway recalls their lovemaking; she expresses
the notion that Shakespeare would ‘dive for pearls’,
and she describes the sweet words he said to her
as ‘shooting stars’ that landed on her lips when he
kissed her.
description of Shakespeare as ‘My living laughing
love’. She tells us in line thirteen how she treasures
her memories of him with the metaphor ‘I hold him
in .the casket of my widow’s head’. The final line
compares this act to the way in which Shakespeare
held Anne so lovingly in that second-best bed. The
last two lines are a rhyming couplet, just as the last
two lines of a Shakesperian sonnet would be, ending
the poem with a sense of unity.
Duffy’s ‘Anne Hathaway’ is a poem full of rich ima-
gery, the tale of a woman who remembers her hus-
band in a wonderful, loving way with no hint of
sorrow. It is beautiful to read and to dwell on the
magical pictures that are painted within it.

From line five to line ten Duffy uses imagery in a

fascinating way that relates directly to the fact that
Shakespeare was a writer. Anne sees her body as ‘a
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softer rhyme to his ... now assonance’, assonance

being a figure of speech in which the same vowel
sound is repeated. Then follows the charming perso-
nification of his touch, portrayed as ‘a verb dancing
in the centre of a noun’, giving a feeling of grace and
delicacy. Anne says that she sometimes dreamed
that Shakespeare had ‘written’ her, wishing that
she herself were part of his artistic creation. She
metaphorically imagines the bed as ‘a page beneath
his writer’s hands’. She sees their lovemaking as
joliprint

drama enacted through ‘touch’, ‘scent’ and ‘taste’.

In lines eleven and twelve a contrast is created to

the early magic of the poem in the description of
Printed with

how the guests, in the best bed, ‘dozed on, / drib-

bling their prose’; no poetic lovemaking for them!
But line twelve then switches to Anne’s alliterative

http://poetryforgcseenglish.blogspot.com/2009/12/anne-hathaway-carol-ann-duffy.html

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