Anne Hathaway (Carol Ann Duffy)

The bed we loved in was a spinning world

of forests, castles, torchlight, cliff-tops, seas

where he 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

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.

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 is a sonnet written by Carol Ann Duffy spoken in the voice of Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's wife.

The speaker is itself a character, so this sonnet can be considered a dramatic soliloquy that doesn’t follow a set form and that is spoken in the voice of one person.

The sonnet does not follows Shakespeare’s typical structure indeed even if it is organized in fourteen lines it has no a rhyme scheme but it ends with a final rhyming couplet.

From the title the reader expects that know that the poem is spoken by Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway.

the narration start with the imagine of a bed compared to a "spinning world,"  full of imaginary and things, like castles, torchlights and clifftops. Going on Shakespeare's words are linked to shooting stars, and then Anne relates her and her husband's bodies to a  group of poetic vehicles like rhymes and echoes.

Finally is said that their guests slept in their best bed, while the two lovers used ”that next best bed”. Now, her husband lives in her widow memory: she holds him in her thoughts, as he held her on their second best bed.