Anne Hathaway poem analysis

Anne Hathaway by CarolAnn Duffy

Carol Anne Duffy

—  British poet and playwright

—  Professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University

—  Appointed poet laureate in May 2009

—  First woman and first Scottish poet and first known LGBT poet to hold the position

—  UK poet laureate (2009-19)

Works

—  Standing female nude (winner of Scottish arts council award)

—  Selling Manhattan (Somerset Maugham Award)

—  Mean time (1993)-(Whitbread Poetry)

—  Rapture (2005)- TS Eliot Prize

Her poems address issues like oppression and gender violence in accessible language. Duffy is best known for writing love poems that often take the form of monologues.

Topics: gender oppression, expressing them in familiar conversational language.

POEM

Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed…’
(from Shakespeare’s will)

The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where he would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love –
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

Analysis

—  This poem, a sonnet appears in The World's Wife (1999), a collection of poems

—  The World’s Wife contains several poems written about the female other halves of famous male figures from history and literature. The collection covers everyone from Eurydice to Charles Darwin’s wife.

—  The poem is based on the famous passage from Shakespeare’s will regarding his second-best bed.

—  Duffy suggests that this would be their marriage bed, a memento of their love.

—  Anne remembers their lovemaking as a form of romance and drama

—  The speaker tells us that the bed she shared with her husband was a world where his imagination would run riot and where Shakespeare would romantically woo and entertain Anne with his sweet words and kisses. She was like an echo to her husband.

—  Anne’s and Shakespeare's bed is compared to poetry, whereas the guest’s sleeping is prose.

Written in fourteen lines and ending with a rhyming couplet, Duffy’s poem resembles the sonnet form that Shakespeare himself made so famous.

—  Anne of the poem says that the second-best bed was the bed they slept in, made love in, and wrote poetry in.

—  Duffy speaks in the voice of Anne Hathaway who was a silenced woman

—  The epigraph is a little piece of history, it is from Shakespeare’s will, and it tells us that the only item that Shakespeare left for her was the second-best bed.

—  She imagines that the bed is a spinning world filled with fanciful and beautiful things like castles and clifftops.

—  She describes Shakespeare’s words as shooting stars and compares their bodies to a whole bunch of poetic rhythms and echoes.

—  She sometimes dreams that he has written her just as he wrote his plays

—  Anne says that their guest always got the best bed to sleep, which is compared to prose, whereas she and her husband slept in the second-best bed, which is compared to poetry.

—  Now her husband lives in her mind, she holds him in her memory, the same way he held her on the second-best bed.

Anne Hathaway

—  Anne Hathaway was the wife of William Shakespeare. The pair married in 1582 when Shakespeare was a teenager, and Anne was nearly eight years older than him.

—  Shakespeare left Anne in Stratford upon Avon.

—  Shakespeare went on to make a name for himself as a playwright and actor upon the London stage. He bought the most prominent house in New Place

—  His will famously mentions just one item to be left to Anne, the couple’s second bed.

Themes

—  Writing and literature:

The poem is about writing as much as it is a poem about love. Duffy compares sex to writing poems throughout. The poem suggests that Anne Hathaway subordinates her writing powers to her husband’s. The poem is just a tribute to her husband’s skilled writing.

—  Truth:

Duffy wants to set the record straight about Shakespeare’s love for his wife. People tend to interpret that Shakespeare didn’t love his wife. Duffy’s poem gives a different perspective.

Allusion

—  Forest: woodland setting in A Midsummer Night’s dream

—  Castles: Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear

—  Pearls:  The Tempest “full fathom five thy father lies.”

—  Casket: The Merchant of Venice

Holy Sonnets: Batter my Heart, three-person'd God

Holy Sonnets: Batter my Heart, three-person'd God

John Donne

Poem:

Batter my Heart, three-person'd God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp'd town to another due,

Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,

But am betroth'd unto your enemy;

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

INTRODUCTION

™ Batter my Heart is one of the 19 sonnets Donne wrote after taking orders in the Anglican church, it is also known as Divine Meditations

™ It was published in the first edition of Songs and Sonnets (1633)

™ Religious poem

™ Petrarchan verse

™ Rhyme scheme :ABBAABBA (octave), CDCCDC (sestet)

™ Meter: Iambic Pentameter

ANALYSIS

q The poet pictures an afflicted lover of God who is hurt because he has deviated from the holy path to the sinful path

q He urges God to ravish his body and make him chaste

q The poet prays to God in his threefold capacity as the father, the son and the holy spirit, to batter his Heart and reshape it

q God has knocked at him, blown his breath through his bellows and lighted the fire of his love and mercy to purify and reshape him

q But all these methods have ended without attaining the end. Therefore God should overthrow the poet and bend his force to bend, break, blow, and make him new and free from sin.

q The poem is a plea for God to enter and take over the poet's life

THREE IMAGES

™ The poem develops through three images

·      A potter or craftsman repairing  a damaged vessel

·      Military terms: he is like a town captured and being ruled by God's enemy. The poet now a usurped town that owes its allegiance or due to someone else. He is frustrated that his reason, God's governor in the town of his soul is captive to other forces and is failing to persuade him to leave his sins behind

·      The third image is sexual, and the poet compares himself to a woman who is compelled to marry against her will . The tone moves from political to personal. He loves God but "is bethroth'd unto enemy". He seeks God's help to achieve the divorce from his sinful marriage and break free

Donne says he cannot be wooed into salvation but must be taken by force

Donne has put the World and the passionate life entirely behind him and was probing with anxiety for the right relationship with eternal.

The later sonnets display Donne's continuing love of wit and paradoxes but also is deepening concern about his relationship to God

He tempered the cynical indifference of some of his earlier poetry with the submissiveness of faith

His vigorous intellect, willy imagery, and love of paradox characterize his poetry.

THEMES

™ Religion

™ Love: the poet's wish for salvation is the fact that he loves God more than the usual spiritual level. He is interested in two-sided love, where he loves and is loved back

™ Sex is a metaphor; the speaker uses for how God might demonstrate a passion for the speaker

™ His relationship like working is through the encounter of a sexual nature

™ Violence: the poet wishes God to punish him (ravish his body) to mend  his sinful soul

™ Warfare: He calls upon God to storm the walls and retake the invaded fortress. God should not deter from causing damage to the speaker, to bring him to the path of salvation

The Canonization Poem analysis

The Canonization

BY JOHN DONNE

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,

         Or chide my palsy, or my gout,

My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout,

         With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,

                Take you a course, get you a place,

                Observe his honor, or his grace,

Or the king's real, or his stampèd face

         Contemplate; what you will, approve,

         So you will let me love.

Alas, alas, who's injured by my love?

         What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned?

Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?

         When did my colds a forward spring remove?

                When did the heats which my veins fill

                Add one more to the plaguy bill?

Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still

         Litigious men, which quarrels move,

         Though she and I do love.

Call us what you will, we are made such by love;

         Call her one, me another fly,

We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,

         And we in us find the eagle and the dove.

                The phœnix riddle hath more wit

                By us; we two being one, are it.

So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.

         We die and rise the same, and prove

         Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not live by love,

         And if unfit for tombs and hearse

Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;

         And if no piece of chronicle we prove,

                We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;

                As well a well-wrought urn becomes

The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,

         And by these hymns, all shall approve

         Us canonized for Love.

And thus invoke us: "You, whom reverend love

         Made one another's hermitage;

You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;

         Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove

                Into the glasses of your eyes

                (So made such mirrors, and such spies,

That they did all to you epitomize)

         Countries, towns, courts: beg from above

         A pattern of your love!"

› The Canonization is  a poem by English poet John Donne

› It is viewed as exemplifying Donne’s wit and irony

› It consists of 5 stanzas comprising of 9 lines each, so there are 45 lines in the poem

› The poem’s title serves dual purposes: while the lover argues, his love will canonize him into the kind of sainthood, the poem itself functions as the canonization of the pair of lovers.

› The opening lines are “Hold your tongue and let me love.”

Title

› The Canonization refers to the process by

 which people are inducted to the canon of saints.

the poet says that if love affair is impossible in the world, it can become legendary through poetry and the poet and his beloved will  be like saints to the later generations.

Criticism

› New critic Cleanth Brooks used the poem to illustrate his argument for paradox as central to poetry in The Well Wrought Urn

› The Canonization figures prominently in critic Cleanth Brooks’ argument for paradox as integral to poetry, a central tenet to new criticism.

› For Brooks, “The Canonization” serves as a monument, a “well-wrought urn” to the lovers, just as the speaker describes his canonization through love

› The paradox is Donne’s inevitable instrument allowing him with “dignity and precision ” to express the idea that love may be all that is necessary for life. Without it, the matter of Donne’s poem unravels into facts.

Analysis

› The poem is addressed from one friend to another

› The speaker asks his addressee to be quiet and let  him love

›  if the friend cannot be quiet, the speaker asks the friend  to criticize him for his other shortcomings like his gout, his five grey hair, his ruined fortune

› The poet admonishes the addressee to look into his own mind and his wealth and to think of his position and copy the other nobles.

› The poet asks rhetorically “who’s injured by my love?” he says his sighs have not drowned ships

› His tears have not flooded lands, his colds have not chilled spring

› The heat of his veins has not added to the list of those killed by the plague

› Soldiers still find wars and lawyers still find litigious men, regardless of the emotions of the speaker and his lover

› The speaker tells his addressee  to “call us what you will” for it is love that makes them so

› He says that the addressee can “call her one, me another fly” and that they are also like candles which burn by feeding upon their own selves, “and at our own cost die”

› In each other, they  find the eagle and the dove and together (we two being one) illuminate the riddle of the phoenix for they “die and rise the same.” Though unlike the phoenix it is love that slays and resurrects them

› The poet says that they can die by love if they are not able to live by it and if their legends are not fit “for tombs and hearse” it will be fit for poetry.

› A Well wrought Urn does as much justice to a dead man’s ashes as does a gigantic tomb and by the same token, the poem about  the speaker and his lover will cause them to be canonized (ie admitted to the sainthood of love)

› All those who hear their story will invoke the lovers saying that countries towns and courts “Beg from above/ A pattern of your love.”

Form

› The five stanzas of the “Canonization” are metered in Iambic lines ranging from trimeter to pentameter, in each of the nine-line stanzas, the first, third, fourth, and seventh lines are in pentameter.

› Second, fifth, sixth and eighth are in tetrameter

›  rhyme scheme: ABBACCCDD

THEMES

› Canonization: the poet makes a point that the lovers should also be canonized for the way they love each other. They would be canonized in poetry and in the next generation

› Love: Donne advocates platonic love. He considers their love as the legendary love and pious which would later be invoked by the people. He says that love has been the hunting ground for the poet and their love has no place for the tomb, it would find its place in the verses

› Tombs: it has been the traditional practice to build tombs for pious people. Donne argues that love should also be thought to be fit for tombs

As a metaphysical poem

› Grierson says “Donne is metaphysical not only by virtue of his scholasticism but by his deep reflective interest in the experience of which his poetry is the expression, the new psychological curiosity with which he writes of love and religion.”

› On one hand, their love is self-contained and perfect, like a well wrought urn, on the other hand, the ashes in this urn are meant to be spread. This is symbolic of the tale of love spreading throughout the World

› The Canonization is in many ways a typical metaphysical poem where the complexity of substance is expressed with the simplicity of expression

Style

› Donne broke free of conventions and traditions. Conventional poetry lacked emotions, therefore it was artificial. John Donne on the other hand presented his own emotions. Every poem by Donne presents autobiography, yet it is universal in nature.

› Donne’s love poems are full of passion but at the same time, seeking for the permanence of true love. It is a profound contribution to the poetry of human love.

Images

› Donne translates their love to a higher plane. First, he compares himself and his beloved to the eagle and dove, a reference to the renaissance idea in which the eagle fills the sky  above the earth whereas the dove transcends the skies to reach heaven.

› He shifts his image to Phoenix another death by fire symbol, the phoenix is a bird that repeatedly burns in the fire and comes back to life out of the ashes. Suggesting that even though their flames of passion will consume them, the poet and his beloved will be reborn from the ashes of their love.