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  • Anne Hathaway
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Anne Hathaway

Carol Ann Duffy

‘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.

Tags:

love & romance metamorphosis poems about poets Shakespeare wives writing poetry
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Carol Ann Duffyb.1955

First female, first Scottish Poet Laureate in the role's 400 year history, Duffy's combination of tender and tough, humour and lyric, jaded and curious, idiosyncratic and conventional has won her a very wide audience of readers and listeners.
More about Carol Ann Duffy

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