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