Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

 

Anne Hathaway

(1999)


Carol Ann Duffy

(1955– )

 

The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we 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 5
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. 10
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.

 

"Anne Hathaway" Notes

 

 

      

Study Questions

  • Who is Anne Hathaway?

  • Why is "Anne Hathaway" written as a sonnet?

  • What sonnet conventions does it follow? What conventions does it break or modify? Why do you think these effects were made?

  • What is so special about this bed bequeathed to Anne Hathaway?

 

 

Sample Student Responses to Carol Ann Duffy's "Anne Hathaway"

Response 1:

 

 

 

 

 

Kanokwan Surapornchai

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

June 10, 2009

Reading Response 1

 

A Second Best Sonnet

 

Shakespeare’s role-playing begins in bed according to Carol Ann Duffy’s “Anne Hathaway.”  The willed item is an ever-changing stage for loveplay where the stellar poet engages in earthly delights.  Encasing this “living laughing” Shakespeare is his widow’s recollective sonnet “held” together by approximate rhymes.  World and words half rhyme and seas and kisses is light rhyme that is also a near rhyme which Duffy seems to dub “soft.”  The feminine unstressed syllable of kisses transforms Shakespeare’s words as they reach their goal (“these lips”) into realized action.

After this relaxed initial quatrain, the rhymes dissolve even further as the repeated o’s of body, now, softer, now, echo, assonance bring enjambment, continuous over seven lines, to the eye-sonance touch-noun end-rhymes and finally an end-stop, producing word-making and love-making as one act.  More dissimilar eye-sonances substituting for end rhymes (romance-taste, on-love) in the release of built emotions through the next dreamy five lines make the sonnet seem to lose its structure altogether.  The finish, however, is a resonant couplet containing an identical rhyme that insists, in hearkening back, on that identical bed in line 8 with a perfect twist.  This is a turn and final statement in Hathaway’s lesser voice pronounced with the lingering identical chime of the exact head-bed—the best coupling among second best rhymes in a second best sonnet about the second best bed.

 

 

 

 

 

            

 

 

 

 

Links

 

 

Carol Ann Duffy
Interviews
  • Jenni Murray, Woman's Hour, BBC (2009; Carol Ann Duffy gives her first interview as Poet Laureate; audio clip, 41:51 min.: beginning to 14:00 min.)
  • Kirsty Wark, Interview of Carol Ann Duffy, Newsnight (2009; video clip, 4:58 min.)
Poetry

 

 

Reference

Duffy, Carol Ann. The World's Wife. London: Picador, 1999. Print.



Further Reading

Crystal, David and Ben Crystal. Shakespeare's Words: A Glossary and Language Companion. London: Penguin, 2002. Print.

[Arts Reference PR2892 C957S]


Duffy, Carol Ann. New Selected Poems, 1984–2004. London: Picador, 2004. Print.


Kiernan, Pauline. Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Most Outrageous Sexual Puns. London: Quercus, 2006. Print.


Partridge, Eric. Shakespeare's Bawdy. London: Routledge, 2001. Print.

[Arts PR2892 P275S 2001]


 

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Last updated January 17, 2018