Anne Hathaway: Carol Ann Duffy’s Written On the Body?
Anne Hathaway
by Carol Ann Duffy from The World’s Wife
‘Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed …’
(from Shakespeare’s will)
The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we 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.
Commentary to follow. Certainly a new take on DFS sales!!!
And I can’t seem to get away from pearls!
Before I read Carol Ann Duffy’s sonnet about Anne Hathaway I had always just associated the name with a cottage somewhere in Straford! . Duffy takes the association and privileges a new encounter with Shakespeare’s partner which is triumphantly tender, ecstatically sexual, and creatively brilliant.
For the governing conceit that Shakespeare left his wife and lover the ‘second best’ rather than the ‘best bed’ in his will because the second best had a history and story that transcended any such terminology steers us through a sonnet that celebrates procreation in every sense!
‘The bed we loved in was a spinning world..’
How many of us could claim that?! The ‘play ‘on ‘world’ reveals the universe of Shakespeare’s fiction; their passionate personal relationship ; the Globe Theatre and even Shakespeare’s immortal fame. It takes the ordinary and renders it extraordinary, mirroring creativity’s capacity to transform: the very alchemy of the word!
The line runs on listing the magical places of Shakespeare’s plays, suggesting that these places are also ‘sourced’ originally on the body of Anne Hathaway. Her body is his text; the origin of all inspiration. Once agin Duffy uses her ‘pearls’ to suggest sexuality and pleasure. We are in the faery regions of The Tempest whilst also making love! fact and fiction blur because life is fiction and fiction is fact: especially in the hands of Sahkespeare !
The palpable sensuality of Duffy’s ventrioquised voice of Hathaway’s tender remembrance of her partner’s words, elides the body of memory, with the physical body; with the vast ‘body’ of Shakespeare’s immortal words. Fusion is therefore on every level. Such was the power of their connection that he ‘penned’ sacred transcendent words through the ecstasy of their love making:
‘A verb dancing inthe centre of the noun..’
‘ How gorgeous is this admission? It is visually expansive and erotically suggestive, and ( unlike most of the words in Duffy’s world’s wife) euphorically tender!
A bewitching ‘what if’ of syntactical alchemy! Once again it makes the reader smile at the hyperbolic incredibility of such enduring passion.
My favourite line in this poem is one of my favourite in Duffy:
‘My living laughing love..’
The alliterative exclamation of vibrant, immortal passion communicates the ever present tenderness of such a truly enduring love!
Gets me every time!