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Jovica Prasad

Justin Rahul Burrett

English A: Language and Literature

12 August 2022

Poetry Analysis: “Anne Hathaway”

“Anne Hathaway” is a poem written by Carol Ann Duffy and is a part of the collection

“The World’s Wife”. “Anne Hathaway” was written from the perspective of herself and it was

written for her husband, William Shakespeare. In this poem, the poet portrays Anne Hathaway as

a wife who was desperate for her husband’s love. The way that this poem’s structure was created

shows how much thought Duffy put inorder to write this poem. It is well known that William

Shakespeare is also known for his sonnets. So, Duffy has used that thought to write this poem as

a sonnet from Anne Hathaway’s perspective.

The main metaphor used in this poem to show Anne Hathaway’s desperation for her

husband was by talking about the first and second best bed. The poem starts off with an epigraph

and that is a line from Shakespeare’s will, “Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed”. The

poet uses this line as the focal point to write the rest of the poem. The poem continues to talk

about the bed they loved in and how their bodies were in sync and rhyming with one another.

The poet uses metaphors and personification to convey this message. Then she goes on to state

that “Some nights I dreamed he’d written me, the bed a page beneath his writer's hands”. In this

line, Anne tries to convey the message of how she wishes that she was the play he writes, giving

her the attention for once at least. The next line in the poem reads “Romance and drama played
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by touch, by scent, by taste. In the other bed, the best bed, our guests dozed on, dribbling their

prose.” This line again uses metaphor and personification to describe the guests. When the poet

wrote this line, She was trying to convey the message of how the guests are drooling and

sleeping in the first best bed. When she says “Romance and drama played by touch, by scent, by

taste”, she was using the human’s senses to describe it. Humans usually have five senses, but

when reading this poem, she only uses touch, scent and taste, leaving out hearing and seeing. In

this line, the poem was trying to convey that it was silent and dark as the guests were sleeping.

She ends the poem by once again talking about how the second best bed was held for her.

In conclusion, there are many ways this poem can be interpreted. Maybe Shakespeare did

love her so passionately and deeply that he left the second best bed for her because he didn't

want her to be in the first best bed with all the other guests. Maybe Anne Hathaway was his

inspiration for his plays and stories all along. This poem is not only about love but also about

grief. This poem might be dedicated to all the people who have a certain mindset about their

loved ones and there might be a possibility that they were misunderstood. Even though Anne

Hathaway might have misunderstood the love Shakespeare had for her, at the end of the poem

she cherishes her dead husband's presence and reminisces all the memories they had in their

second best bed and that helps her deal with her grief. Throughout this poem, Duffy has used

many poetic devices. The structure of the poem, the tone/mood, and the word choice in this

poem work really well together and make the poem whole. It is also what makes the poem so

deep and meaningful.

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Works Cited

From New Selected Poems 1984-2004 (Picador, 2004). Originally published in The World’s

Wife (Macmillan, 1999).