kerkevik_2014 | POEM: Anne Hathaway by Carol Ann Duffy (Reply)

Posting this as a dedication to

elisi ~ there will be more stories to come, but I need to go home and work on them; write some more, and take care of my kittehs.

There will be some kind of master-post for the fics when they're done; including a list of them in chronological order; aslo likely need to go back and correct a few mistakes :-)

However, I wanted to post a poem before I headed back to the real world.

Really like this poem, it almost feel slike a companion to my favourite story about Shakespeare; Mrs. Shakespeare by Robert Nye, which has been on BBC Radio a few times. Must get the book, and some kind of recording of the radio production too. I think there's a YouTube reading of this, which I must try and find.

Anyway, here's Anne Hathaway by Carol Ann Duffy; from www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poems/anne-hathaway

Anne Hathaway

‘Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed…’

(from Shakespeare’s will)

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.

Carol Ann Duffy

From New Selected Poems 1984-2004 (Picador, 2004). Originally published in The World's Wife (Macmillan, 1999).
Reproduced by kind permission of the author.