Love and Poetry

The central motif of "Anne Hathaway" is the conflation of love and poetry. Throughout the poem, the speaker attempts to describe the importance of the "second-best bed" left to her by her husband, emphasizing that the bed was the site of their physical and spiritual union. In this way, the poem is quite a sensual one, as it essentially revolves around various descriptions of sex. However, none of these descriptions are necessarily explicit. Instead, the speaker relies on language associated with writing poetry in order to describe the more sensual aspects of the bed. "My lover’s words," she says, "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" (3-7). Here, the speaker equates her body and her lover's...