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