Analysis of sonnet “Anne Hathaway” by Carol Ann Duffy.

This poem is a sonnet written by Carol Anne Duffy during the ‘90s.
It is organized in 3 quatrains and a rhyming couplet as all the sonnets.
The intelligent reader can understand from the title the protagonist of the sonnet is Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife. Reading the text comes out that the speaking voice is Shakespeare’s wife.
In this poem the speaking voice remembers how she and her husband used to make love. She compares the way they used to make love to the writing of a poetry.
The first quatrain introduces the topic: the speaking voice tells about how her and her husband’s love was like. In the first quatrain the speaking voice introduces the first element of a poem: words. This word is connected to “world” by the rhyme, because words are the world of poetry.
The second quatrain develops the topic and Anne talks about her lover such as he would have been the sky and she the earth.
In the last quatrain the speaking voice, Anne, compares herself to a “white page beneath her husband hand”. This quatrain is an essay of the topic.
In these quatrains are mentioned others elements connected to poetry: rhyme, assonance, verb, noun, romance, drama, prose. This elements allow the intelligent reader to understand that the way the speaking voice is talking about making love corresponds to the way a writer writes a sonnet.
The intelligent reader can also understand the idea Anne has about Shakespeare: she considers him a great man because he is a great writer. But she also knows she is not Shakespeare’s first choice.
Carol Duffy used assonances, alliterations and enjambments to emphasize some words or phrases to connotate Anne and Shakespeare’s love. In this poem Carol Duffy takes inspiration from Shakespearean sonnets, she uses some elements such as the forest and the castle which are present in Shakespeare’s poems too. Immediately the reader is transported to a magical landscape filled with metaphor. The speaking voice talks about the “bed where they loved” as a “spinning world” which is far away from the world of the other humans, indeed the bed becomes their own world. In their lovemaking, the couple found something precious and valuable, as implied by the pearls in line three. This intimate, sensual tone is continued in the metaphor comparing her lover’s words to “shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses”. So, in the opening quatrain, Duffy clearly illustrates the intensity of the romantic, passionate relationship of the two lovers. The reference,again,to the bed at the end of line eight creates a link to the opening line of the poem and reinforces the symbolic significance of the bed as a representation of their love.The enjambment from line eight continues the extended metaphor from the previous quatrain as the bed is compared to the parchment on which the passion and excitement so associated with the playwright was written. The rhyming couplet generally has the function to resume the topic and gives a solution to the problem, in this case the couplet gives just an end to the sonnet.The metaphor of holding her lover in the protective “casket of her imagination” convey the idea that their love survived death thanks to her lover words that remained.
This sonnet has two main themes:
-passion and love
-death and remembrance
In the poem, Duffy really concentrates on conveying that Anne and Shakespear’s marriage was based on an all love aspects: she presents both the sexually and emotionally aspect of their love. Fittingly with the protagonists of the sonnet she uses language itself as an extended metaphor to convey the intensity of their passion. The other theme that is developed in this sonnet is the memory: the best way to remember a lover is to keep alive her/his characteristic aspects.