Textuality » 4ALS Textuality
In this text I’m going to analyse the sonnet Anne Hathaway by Carol Ann Duffy.
In this sonnet, the poetess speaks to the reader from Anne Hathaway’s point of view, making it a dramatic monologue.
The topic of the sonnet is her relationship with her husband (William Shakespeare), described focusing on their “next best bed”, which is the only thing that Shakespeare left to Anne Hathaway in his will.
The topic is developed by a series of metaphors, which aren’t elaborated regularly.
Starting from the first quatrain, indeed, the first metaphor made by the speaking voice describes the bed, comparing it to “a spinning world of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas where we would dive for pearls”. Instead of developing the theme in the entire quatrain, she begins developing another one at the end of the third verse. She compares her lover’s words to shooting stars, and ends the comparison on the first line of the second quatrain. The speaking voice, then, describes how she felt in that bed, comparing her body to some figures of speech and comparing his touch to “a verb dancing in the centre of a noun”.
On the last line of this quatrain, she tells that some nights she “dreamed he’d written me” and begins another comparison between the bed and “a page between his writer’s hands”.
The second part of the metaphor is developed in the third and last quatrain, where she indirectly compares she and her husband’s loving to “romance and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste”.
On the last part of this quatrain she tells about their guests, who are “dozed on” in their best bed, and are “dribbling their prose”.
The last sentence of the sonnet begins in the last verse of the last quatrain, and tells about Anne’s current situation: she’s now a widow, who holds the memory of her love in “the casket of my widow’s head”. The sonnet ends with a simile, where Anne compares the way she holds the memory to the way he held her in their second best bed.
This sonnet develops is an interpretation of Shakespeare’s will, which seems to be greedy and mean toward his wife. The speaking voice tells the contrary of this. Anne Hathaway and his husband loved passionately, and this underlined by the large number of metaphors used. All of them refer to Shakespeare’s profession. This can be seen from the first comparison, where the bed is said to be a spinning world of different scenarios created by the lovers’ imagination. In particular, Anne dreams to be a character created by her husband and the guests’ love is said to be inferior, since they’re “dribbling their prose” on their best bed.
The structure is also a reference to Shakespeare, but it’s used more freely. The themes of the sonnet aren’t developed separately in the quatrains with a conclusion in the rhyming couplet, but are mixed, creating a series of run on lines. Also, the sonnet hasn’t got a schematic rhyming structure, since only the rhyming couplet is in rhyme.
In conclusion, the sonnet is a proof of the love between Anne and her husband, which isn’t a common kind of love, like their guests’, but is passionate and vivid, even if Shakespeare’s dead. This is proved by Anne’s memory, where she still holds her husband (meaning that he will always be alive there), and by Shakespeare’s will, where he leaves his wife their “next best bed” as a sign of his love. This is underlined by the use of language the poetess makes, using metaphors to underline to the literary world to mark the intensity of the couple’s love, and enjambements and alliterations to describe their love.