See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/276464909

Sonority and Semantics in “Annabel Lee”

Article  in  The Edgar Allan Poe Review · April 2015

DOI: 10.5325/edgallpoerev.16.1.0107

CITATION READS
1 934

1 author:

Sławomir Studniarz
University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn
10 PUBLICATIONS   3 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

the relation between sound and sense in E. A. Poe's poetry View project

the phonosemantic approach to Samuel Beckett's poetry and late short fiction View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Sławomir Studniarz on 02 September 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Sonority and Semantics in “Annabel Lee”
Author(s): Sławomir Studniarz
Source: The Edgar Allan Poe Review, Vol. 16, No. 1, Special Issue: Poe and Music (Spring
2015), pp. 107-125
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/edgallpoerev.16.1.0107
Accessed: 18-12-2016 10:47 UTC

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/edgallpoerev.16.1.0107?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
Edgar Allan Poe Review

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Sonority and Semantics in “Annabel Lee”
Sławomir Studniarz, University of Warmia and Mazury

Abstract
Compared to the studies of Poe’s fictional prose, the dearth of book-length studies
devoted solely to his poetry and offering fresh, revisionary perspectives on Poe’s
poetic oeuvre as a whole, is surprising. One of the probable causes of this criti-
cal neglect, pointed out by several scholars, for instance, Dwayne Thorpe, Kent
Ljungquist, and most recently Robert Evans, is perhaps the traditional view of Poe
as the “jingle man,” supposedly preoccupied with musical and metrical effects for
their own sake. Contrary to this condescending view of his verse, still encountered
in some quarters, this article aims to demonstrate that “Annabel Lee” poem is a
prime example of the way in which metrical and phonetic orchestration in Poe’s
poetry contributes to the development of meaning. The present article undertakes
to demonstrate how the prosodic shape and the sound texture of “Annabel Lee” put
forward its theme—the idea of love as a union that transcends both earthly and
unearthly impediments. “Annabel Lee” shares many features with “The Raven.”
In addition to their common thematic concerns—the death of a beloved woman
and the speaker’s response to the loss—these two late poems exploit the device of
paronomasia, the similarity of sound to suggest the similarity of sense.

Keywords
metrical pattern; phonetic orchestration; sound and sense relation; paronomasia;
alliteration

Despite its evident fame, the poem “Annabel Lee,” completed by Edgar Allan
Poe shortly before his death, remains relatively unexplored when it comes to the
relation between sound and sense. Although its musicality has been frequently
commented on, the close correspondence between its phonetic orchestration
and its semantic dimension has not been adequately examined. With a view to
at least partially filling this critical gap, the present article aims to demonstrate

the edgar allan poe review, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2015

Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 107 27/03/15 6:30 AM

 that the prosodic shape and the justly admired sound texture of “Annabel Lee”
are important functional elements, for they participate in the creation of the
text’s meaning and put forward its theme—the idea of love as a union that tran-
scends both earthly and unearthly impediments. Central to this conception is
the peculiar construction of the poem, wherein the contrastive structural prin-
ciples enforce its division into two distinct semantic sections, with the final line
of the fourth stanza serving as a transition marker. This pivotal line describes
the death of Annabel Lee, the devastating event that was a turning point in the
speaker’s life, and the two stanzas that follow convey the speaker’s triumphant
assertion of his devotion to the beautiful mistress and his spiritual rise. And it is
the aim of the ensuing analysis to reveal the complex ways in which this process
is enacted in the poem’s sound structure, culminating in the phonological and
metrical arrangement of the concluding stanza.
The concern with sound in poetry looms large in all of Poe’s major theo-
retical pronouncements, beginning with “Reviews of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told
Tales,” where he considers rhythm “an essential aid in the development of the
poem’s highest idea—the idea of the Beautiful,”1 and culminating in his famous
definition of poetry in “The Poetic Principle” as “the Rhythmical Creation of
Beauty” (Essays, 78). In “The Rationale of Verse” he attributes the origins of
poetry to “the human enjoyment of equality, fitness,” and to this “enjoyment”
he consistently refers “all the moods of verse—rhythm, metre, stanza, rhyme,
alliteration, the refrain, and other analogous effects” (Essays, 33). In the same
essay, he also considers the application of metrical inversion for achieving a
particular artistic effect, stating that “in all rhythms, the prevalent or distinctive
feet may be varied at will, and nearly at random, by the occasional introduction
of equivalent feet, that is to say, feet the sum of whose syllabic times is equal
to the sum of the syllabic times of the distinctive feet” (Essays, 45). However,
Poe allows such “equivalent feet only at rare intervals, and at such points of
their subject as seem in accordance with the startling character of the variation”
(Essays, 45).
As regards to the phonetic orchestration, in “The Rationale of Verse” he
points out the potential of sound repetitions in shaping the texture of the poem,
repetitions involving clusters of phonemes and larger, lexical and syntactic
units. He recognizes the effect of “the refrain, or burden, where, at the closes of
the several stanzas of a poem, one word or phrase is repeated; and of allitera-
tion, in whose simplest form a consonant is repeated in the commencements
of various words” (Essays, 41). But he extends the principle “so as to embrace
repetitions both of vowels and of consonants, in the bodies as well as in the
beginnings of words,” and finally, the effect “would be made to infringe on the

108 Sławomir Studniarz

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 108 27/03/15 6:30 AM

 province of rhyme, by the introduction of general similarity of sound between
whole feet occurring in the body of a line [. . .]” (Essays, 41). The recurring pho-
netic clusters as well as the chains of sonically related words and phrases would
act as the indicators for the famous “‘under currents’ of meaning,” the agents
of the “suggestiveness” that imparts to poetic texts “so much of that richness”
(Essays, 24).
Sound phenomena indeed play a crucial role in poetry and can never
be treated as the merely decorative element. According to the Polish scholar
Andrzej Zgorzelski, poems should be viewed as “sound-and-sense structures,”
by which he means complicated networks of relations, networks of “sound
patterns, stress regularities, compositional divisions and syntactical linguistic
units.”2 Thus proper analysis of any poem should follow from the assumption
that sound phenomena are “the only possible ways to express the poem’s mes-
sage” and that “sound elements have both semantic and semiotic functions in
the creation of the text’s meaning.”3
Hence due attention should be paid to metrical patterns shaping the poem’s
prosodic structure. Here, any tension in its rhythmic organization, any clash
of differing metrical profiles, can readily assume a semantic function. In the
poetic text, opposing tendencies in the ordering of stresses, syllables, rhymes,
lexical and syntactic units, can serve as important sense-discriminating phe-
nomena. According to Yuri Lotman, such conflicts or oppositions in fact define
the reality of the poetic text.4 The poetic text is never the simple realization
of the system, be it the meter, the genre convention, or any other system, and
Lotman, accordingly, describes the result in terms of “a conflict, a tension [. . .]
a contradiction between the different sorts of constructional elements [. . .] or
between the realization or non-realization of a single constructional series (the
metric system).”5 He argues that “in a work of art deviations from the structural
organization can be as meaningful as the realization of the latter.”6
The breach of the structuring rules can manifest itself as the tension between
different metrical patterns in the poem’s prosodic structure. As Lotman observes,
against the background of the idealized metrical order of the poem revealed by
scansion, “the text is perceived as a simultaneous realization and disruption of
certain rules, as recurrence and non-recurrence in their mutual tension.”7 For the
Russian semiotician, such phenomena as clashing prosodic patterns and extensive
disruptions of the meter are merely particular instances of the transition “from
one set of structure-forming principles to others within a single work, which
results from the tendency of the artistic text towards maximal information con-
tent.”8 Within the poetic text, the disruption of the dominant prosodic patterns,
or the shift from one metrical system to another, serve as sense-discriminating

Sonority and Semantics in “Annabel Lee” 109

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 109 27/03/15 6:30 AM

 devices, and as a result, the level of rhythmic organization becomes an area of
rich patterning with a high potential for “semantic saturation.”9
It is crucial to determine the function of metrical arrangements in the
poem’s structure, for variations on the level of the prosody indeed become
semanticized, but, most important, their meaning is always determined by the
“higher” levels, by the network of lexical, syntactic, and semantic relations—in
other words, by the poem’s unique artistic design. As Lotman puts it, “[T]he
semantic units and their relationship in a given text interpret the meanings of
the elements of the lowest levels. But there is also a reverse dependency, the cor-
relation of phonemes generates semantic convergences and antitheses on the
highest levels, i.e., the phonological structure interprets the semantic.”10
However, it must be noted that except as signals of the poem’s generic sta-
tus, metrical arrangements in themselves do not convey any fixed and predeter-
mined sense. It is vital to recognize that prosodic patterns cannot be analyzed
in isolation from the poem’s phonological and lexical–syntactic layers, sepa-
rately from their position in the poem’s overall structure. One must always bear
in mind that it is the elaborate network binding the disparate materials into a
semantic whole, the unique poetic “supercode” that endows the poem’s metrical
patterns with signification. The semantic indeterminacy of prosodic arrange-
ments has also been noticed by Reuven Tsur, who points out that prosodic
structures are “double-edged,” which means that in various larger contexts the
same metrical pattern can be endowed with a different “poetic quality”: “It will
be noted that some metric structures are ‘double-edged,’ that is, they may act in
two (or more) ways, depending on which of their combinational potentials are
actualized.”11 Thus, instead of any fixed semantic aspects of rhythmical units,
the Hebrew scholar speaks of “combinational potentials of metrical, syntactical
and thematical elements which may or may not be realized in one or another
actual combination, yielding a variety of poetic qualities.”12
While discussing the significance of sound patterns in poetry, it is neces-
sary to mention also the pioneering contribution of Roman Jakobson, who a
long time ago stated that “[a]ny attempts to confine such poetic conventions
as meter, alliteration, or rhyme to the sound level are speculative reasonings
without any empirical justification.”13 And it is no accident that in order to illus-
trate in his essay the relation between sound and sense in poetry the Russian
scholar chose the concluding stanza of “The Raven,” making there the following
comment:

The perch of the raven, “the pallid bust of Pallas,” is merged through
the “sonorous” paronomasia /páelәd/—/páelәs/ into one organic whole

110 Sławomir Studniarz

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 110 27/03/15 6:30 AM

 [. . .]. Both confronted words were blended earlier in another epithet of
the same bust—placid /pláesıd/—a poetic portmanteau, and the bond
between the sitter and the seat was in turn fastened by a paronomasia:
“bird or beast upon the . . . bust.” [. . .] The never-ending stay of the grim
guest is expressed by a chain of ingenious paronomasias, partly inver-
sive.  [. . .]. In the introductory line of this concluding stanza, “raven,”
contiguous to the bleak refrain word “never,” appears once more as an
embodied mirror image of this “never”: /n.v.r./—/r.v.n./. Salient parono-
masias interconnect both emblems of the everlasting despair, first “the
Raven, never flitting,” at the beginning of the very last stanza, and second,
in its very last lines, the “shadow that lies floating on the floor” and “shall
be lifted—nevermore.”14

With its exploitation of paronomasia—that is, the similarity of sound to

suggest the convergence of sense15—“The Raven” by no means stands alone in
Poe’s poetic output. As the forthcoming analysis of “Annabel Lee” undertakes
to show, this poem may also serve as an excellent illustration of the crucial
relation between sonority and semantics in his verse. However, before tackling
the issue of the poem’s sonic and metrical organization, in order to ground the
findings in the larger critical context, a brief survey of the existing commentary
on Poe’s poetry is in order.
Compared to the amount of monographs on his fictional prose, the dearth
of book-length studies devoted solely to his poetry and offering fresh, revi-
sionary perspectives on Poe’s poetic oeuvre as a whole, is surprising. In 1996
Dwayne Thorpe voiced the complaint characteristic of the advocates of Poe’s
verse, pointing out that even though occasional essays on Poe’s poetry do
appear, these are mostly “analyses of single poems, not attempts to view the
poetry as a whole.”16 Striking a similar note, in 1997 Kent P. Ljungquist, after
surveying the state of Poe studies “on the scholarly and critical fronts,” con-
cluded that “Poe remains the least comprehensively researched major author of
the American Renaissance.”17 The neglect can be partly explained by the gen-
eral shift of critical interest away from single-author studies brought about by
the advent of Lacanian psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and deconstruction.
Poe’s output—and mostly fiction at that, with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym quickly soaring to prominence—was then largely treated as the fertile
ground for hunting the tropes of self-reflexivity, the signs of all-pervasive irony,
the evidence of deferred meaning, and the traces of cryptographic imagina-
tion. Scott Peeples in the chapter titled “Out of Space, Out of Time: From Early
Formalism to Deconstruction,” from his study The Afterlife of Poe, details the

Sonority and Semantics in “Annabel Lee” 111

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 111 27/03/15 6:30 AM

 evolution of the critical concerns and the consequent treatment of Poe’s writing,
stating that in the 1980s “critics began to describe Poe’s textual world in the lan-
guage of deconstruction. The lightning-rod text was Pym, which Ricardou saw
as a ‘journey to the bottom of the page’ [. . .] and to which Rowe devoted his
chapter on Poe.”18
Even if in the last decades of the twentieth century and the early years
of the twenty-first Poe’s poems did become objects of critical inquiry, chiefly
in articles placed in various journals and magazines, or in essays included in
occasional collections or critical companions, such random and dispersed pub-
lications cannot form a coherent body of criticism, sustaining and orienting
further research into his poetry. The publication in the series Critical Insights in
2010 by Salem Press of the volume of essays, some old and some newly written,
titled The Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, did not improve the situation greatly. One
of the contributors, Robert Evans, apparently acknowledging the deficiency of
the current state of research, issued a passionate call for undertaking serious
studies into Poe’s poems, arguing that “[w]hat is most needed, however, is a
comprehensive volume that patiently makes the case, line by line and some-
times word by word, for the skill and power and beauty of the best examples
of Poe’s verse.”19 He rightly emphasizes that such a volume “would be especially
useful in the case of Poe, since the merits of his poetry have been denied so
strongly, and so often, by so many significant writers and critics.”20
One of the probable causes of the above-mentioned critical censure is per-
haps the still-persisting view of Poe as the “jingle man,” supposedly preoccu-
pied with musical and metrical effects for their own sake. This label, attached to
him by Ralph Waldo Emerson, was perpetuated by Aldous Huxley, who com-
pared Poe’s “much too musical verse” to “a carapace of jewelled sound, into
which the sense, like some snotty little seminarist, irrelevantly creeps and is
lost.”21 In his essay tellingly titled “Vulgarity in Literature” Huxley made some
large yet unjustified claims about Poe’s poetry. Focusing on “Ulalume” in par-
ticular, he accused the poem of excess, opulence, and vulgarity and mocked its
“walloping dactylic metre.”22 The pattern of stress distribution in the opening
lines clearly points to iambic and anapestic feet, hence it is hard to understand
Huxley’s damning remark, apparently as groundless as his assertion that the
rhythms of the poem are “strong, insistent, and practically invariable,”23 which
does not stand up to closer scrutiny either.
Nevertheless, Huxley’s disparaging assessment was still taking its toll in
the 1970s, prompting Richard Fletcher to claim in his monograph The Stylistic
Development of Edgar Allan Poe that in Poe’s poetry, “whenever sound produces
effective meanings, the inference lies near at hand that the correspondence has

112 Sławomir Studniarz

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 112 27/03/15 6:30 AM

 occurred by accident more than by design.”24 That this denial of its merits is not
a thing of the past can be evidenced by the comment made by Harold Bloom in
his introduction to Bloom’s Classic Critical Views: Edgar Allan Poe, published in
2008, where he declares bluntly that “the plain badness of Poe’s various styles,
in prose and verse, is merely palpable,” and he even refuses to call Poe’s verse
poetry, concluding that his poems “remain beyond aesthetic salvation.”25 Daniel
Hoffman in his article “Edgar Allan Poe: The Artist of the Beautiful,” on the
whole favorable, apparently agrees with the critics who denigrate Poe’s poems
“for their inflated and pretentious diction, their mind-deadening repetitions,
their commitment to draconian rhyme-schemes and mechanical meters,” say-
ing that “[w]hile these characteristics are indeed true, a defense of Poe’s prac-
tice is in order.”26 Even in her recent contribution to The Cambridge History of
American Literature: Nineteenth-Century Poetry, 1800–1910, in the chapter titled
“Edgar Allan Poe: Repetition, Women, and Signs,” Shira Volosky endorses the
traditional deprecation of his poetry, contending that “[s]uch reduction of lan-
guage to sound bordering on nonsense, the sort of thing that set Poe up for
parody (as with Huxley’s famous ones), is of course his most outstanding sty-
listic marker.”27
Notwithstanding this condescending view of his verse, still encountered in
some quarters, the sound organization of “Annabel Lee” has managed to attract
the attention of a handful of critics. Floyd Stovall, in his very important essay
“Mood, Meaning, and Form in Poe’s Poetry,” mentions “the hypnotic effect of
the repetition of harmonized sound and sense through the poem”; however, he
fails to elaborate on how the sound and the sense are harmonized in “Annabel
Lee,” instead pointing out the obvious features of the poem: the increasingly
complex rhyme pattern, the varying length of stanza, the “predominantly ana-
pestic” rhythm.28 Edward Davidson generally dismisses it as an exercise, char-
acteristic of Poe’s late poetry, in the application of the “laws of effect, mood,
tone, music, length of poems,” which, he contends, reach “their culmination
in such a piece of expansion and overwriting as these lines [in the second
and in the fifth stanza] from ‘Annabel Lee,’ wherein, by means of repetition,
each stanza coiled back on and absorbed its predecessor before it could move
on again.”29 In a somewhat similar vein, Richard Wilbur observes that “[i]n
this poem, Poe carried his penchant for incantatory repetition to an extreme,
employing not only recurrent words and lines but a continual doubling-back
of the narrative.”30
Despite the much-emphasized “incantatory repetition,” or perhaps to
counteract the oppressive force of the lexical and syntactic monotony, the
poem’s construction displays a considerable irregularity. It is divided into six

Sonority and Semantics in “Annabel Lee” 113

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 113 27/03/15 6:30 AM

 stanzas of unequal length, consisting of six, seven, or eight lines, and the length
of a line varies, too, ranging from six to thirteen syllables. But the lines fall
neatly into two distinct types: long ones, which contain four strong syllables,
and short ones, which include three strong syllables. The alternation of the long
and short lines and the presence of rhyme in the short, even-numbered lines
undoubtedly point to the ballad stanza, which, as Thomas Carper and Derek
Attridge explain, is “a four-line stanza whose first and third lines have four
beats (tetrameter) and are usually unrhymed; the second and fourth lines have
three pronounced beats (trimeter) and are rhymed.”31
The ballad model is loosely followed in the poem, but the metrical pattern
on which the stanzas are founded is far from obvious, despite the claims of
the critics, who generally identify it as anapestic. According to Alfred Corn,
“Annabel Lee” is written in alternating anapestic tetrameter and anapestic
trimeter.32 Concurring with Corn, Thorpe additionally points out the effect of
the meter, saying that “the poem’s anapests create an artful valse triste: a lovely
melody and haunting rhythm that have made it almost as well known as ‘The
Raven,’”33 and their “music” in his opinion suggests “the soul’s yearnings for a
world beyond time and fate.”34 However, scansion of the initial lines reveals that
they contain both anapestic and iambic feet in varying proportions:

It was mány and mány a yeár agó,

In a kíngdom bý the séa,
That a máiden there líved whom yoú may knów
By the náme of ánnabel Lée;—
And this máiden she líved with nó other thóught
Than to lóve and be lóved by mé.35

The opening line contains two anapests and two iambs, while the following
shorter line consists of one anapest and two iambs. The oscillation between the
anapestic and iambic feet, the resulting poem’s “strange rhythm,” was noted a
long ago by Thomas Olive Mabbott, who said that adopting the “peculiar met-
rical structure of Wordsworth’s ‘many and many a song’ in an early version of
‘Guilt and Sorrow,’” Poe “boldly began, ‘It was many and many a year ago’—and
continued the whole ballad in this strange rhythm.”36
As a rule, a line in the poem begins with a weak syllable, generally in an
anapestic foot, but an iamb in the initial position occurs occasionally, too.
However, later on in the poem, significant exceptions appear because this regu-
larity is broken on a number of occasions in lines that begin with a stressed
syllable, which gives them a special weight, explored in the article further on.

114 Sławomir Studniarz

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 114 27/03/15 6:30 AM

 Similarly, the lines in the poem nearly always end on strong syllables, with the
exception of three lines: one terminating with “chilling,” Ss (the third line of the
third stanza), and two with “Heaven,” Ss (the fifth line of the second stanza and
the first line of the fourth stanza), which also makes for a pronounced rhetori-
cal emphasis. In addition, a crucial rhythmical link is forged between “[angels
in] Heaven” and “chilling,” between the perpetrators of the crime and the crime
itself, the “chilling and killing of Annabel Lee.” As Marina Tarlinskaja argues,
phrases based on the same underlying rhythmical figure enter into meaningful
relations with one another,37 as exemplified in the poem by the metrical and
semantic “coupling” of the heavenly beings with their heinous action.
As stated above, the dominant metrical pattern in “Annabel Lee” is ana-
pestic with a varying admixture of iambs, but exclusively iambic lines can also
be found: “So thát her hígh-born kínsmen cáme,” sS sS sS sS. However, as the
poem progresses, the increasing tendency toward lines perfectly embodying
the anapestic meter can be observed. Such lines consisting of three or four ana-
pests do occur in the final two stanzas, and it is the contention of the pres-
ent article that the final emergence of metrically “pure” lines in combination
with the rich phonetic patterning and, most important, in conjunction with the
semantic thrust of the lines in question, represents the ideal order or harmony
intimately connected with the poem’s theme.
However, while analyzing the meter in “Annabel Lee,” one must pay atten-
tion not only to the perfect lines, which will be discussed in detail below, but
also to those lines that break the pattern, because such disruptive lines are
endowed with special significance—they stand out metrically from the rest of
the poem, which foregrounds their meaning. The first instance of this metri-
cal disruption occurs in the first line of the second stanza: “Í was a chíld and
shé was a chíld,” Ss sS sS ssS. Accent here falls on the initial syllable, “I,” and it
is emphatically reinforced by graphic signals, by the use of italics. As a result,
a trochaic foot is created, a strong syllable followed by a weak one. The same
metrical inversion appears in the fourth line of the same stanza: “Í and my
Ánnabel Lée,” Ss sS ssS, with the initial stressed syllable. This metrical profile,
with the initial trochaic foot, is special and emphatic. It is no accident that these
two lines refer to the speaker and his beloved. Defying the dominant mixed
anapestic–iambic meter, these lines underscore the opposition of the speaker
and Annabel Lee to the world and the supernatural realm alike; the semantic
tension is emphasized here by contrasting prosodic patterns.
Metrical inversion involving initial trochaic substitution is also employed
in the lines describing the reaction of the angels in heaven to the love that binds
the speaker and his beloved, the envy of the seraphim, who, as the speaker

Sonority and Semantics in “Annabel Lee” 115

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 115 27/03/15 6:30 AM

 says, “[c]óveted hér and mé,” which generates the sequence of one trochee
followed by two iambs, Ss sS sS. Their love transcends both the natural and
preternatural order, provoking the envious seraphim to send a chilling wind
that kills Annabel Lee. The line describing this cruel action—“A wínd blew oút
of a cloúd, chílling”—ends on a weak syllable, but what is more important, the
substitution of the trochee in the final position, the foot consisting of a strong
syllable followed by a weak one, results in the emphatic sequence of two strong
syllables: “cloud, chilling,” SSs. As Corn points out, “[T]he juxtaposition of
the two strongly stressed syllables is sometimes referred to as clashing accents,
because the effect is very marked.”38 To give even more weight to the line, strong
enjambment is created by splitting the action, “chilling,” and its direct object,
“Annabel Lee,” which is transferred to the next line.
Likewise, the line dwelling on the crime perpetrated by the angels at the
close of the fourth stanza—“Chílling and kílling my Ánnabel Lée”—is shaped
according to the principle which opposes the dominant metrical pattern. Here,
the metrical arrangement of the line, Ss sS ssS ssS, with the initial trochaic foot,
serves to emphasize the premature and abrupt departure of Annabel Lee from
the world. Her death at such a tender age violates the natural order, which is
additionally foregrounded by the use, for the very first time in the poem, of
strong internal rhymes—“chilling and killing.” Furthermore, the line in ques-
tion, the final line of the fourth stanza, spoils the regular sequence of long (four-
feet) and short (three-feet) lines because it is equal, both in length and in the
number of feet, to the preceding one. This peculiarly shaped line, which con-
cludes the fourth stanza, performs in the poem the important function of a bor-
derline marker; it is a pivotal line that divides the poem in two unequal parts.
The death of Annabel Lee was a turning point in the speaker’s life, and the
line describing this shattering event, likewise, marks a transition in the poem.
This semantic shift is underscored by the emergence of new ordering principles
on many levels in the poem’s construction. First, the two stanzas that follow are
set apart from the rest of the poem syntactically, because they are, in fact, one
extended sentence, thus forming a single meaningful unit. By contrast, in the
first part of the poem the stanzas are not related to one another by syntax—the
stanzaic division corresponds to the syntactic division, which means that each
stanza comprises one complete sentence. The dominant rhyme pattern in the
initial four stanzas is quite regular, and mostly limited to the same recurring
words: “sea,” “me,” and “Lee.” Matthew Bolton offers an illuminating comment
on the function of the rhyme scheme in the poem, and on its repetitiveness,
observing that “[i]n the narrator’s mind, the name of his dead lover is inextri-
cably linked with his own consciousness (‘me’) and with the place where she is

116 Sławomir Studniarz

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 116 27/03/15 6:30 AM

 buried: ‘ . . . her sepulchre there by the sea— / . . . her tomb by the side of the
sea,’” and he concludes that in the poem “rhyme and repetition are an enact-
ment of the narrator’s grief and of his fixation on the deceased Annabel Lee.”39
The rhyme pattern, however, undergoes a significant modification in
the second part of the poem. In the last two stanzas “we” replaces “me” in
the rhyming position, which anticipates the final revelation of the union of the
speaker’s soul with the soul of Annabel Lee. Furthermore, the repetition of “we”
in the two consecutive lines yields the new rhyming scheme abba. In addi-
tion, the internal grammatical rhyme appears, shifting its position within each
consecutive line—“stronger, older, wiser.” This shifting internal rhyme, com-
pounded with the repetition of “love” in the first line, the anaphora “of,” and the
epistrophic phrase “than we,” creates a striking parallel sequence:

But our love it was stronger by far than the love

Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—.

New rhymes appear in the second part of the poem: “love—above” in the
penultimate stanza, and in the final stanza, the rhyming pair “side—bride.” The
latter joins the subsequent lines, and this, in conjunction with the repetition
of “sea,” produces in the final four lines of the last stanza the sequence of two
rhymed couplets, ccbb, an entirely unprecedented phenomenon in the poem’s
structure.
However, the modifications and innovations in the rhyme pattern are only
one aspect of the new structural principles that shape the second part of the poem.
First of all, the last two stanzas of the poem are marked by distinct and heavy
alliteration. Previously, the use of alliteration was not so extensive, and its most
important instances were variations based on the nasal consonants N and M and
the diphthong /eı/ in the opening stanza—“many and many . . . maiden . . . may
know . . . name” / ‘mænı әn ‘mænı . . . ‘meıdәn . . . meı nә . . . neım/—and the
Ω

repetition of the initial H in the first line of the fourth stanza—“The angels, not
half so happy in Heaven.” By contrast, alliteration spanning across two lines and
involving the consonant D, and the repetition of the final R four times, mark
the fifth and sixth line of the penultimate stanza: “Nor the demons down under
the sea, / Can ever dissever my soul from the soul.” One must also note the echo
rhyme in the neighboring words in the sixth line, “ever dissever,” and the repeti-
tion of “soul” in the same line.
However, all the devices shaping the sound structure of the poem dis-
cussed so far, namely, end rhyme, internal rhyme, repetition, parallelism, and

Sonority and Semantics in “Annabel Lee” 117

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 117 27/03/15 6:30 AM

 alliteration, culminate in the last stanza. The internal rhymes in the first, third,
and fifth lines, “beams—dreams,” “rise—eyes,” “tide—bride,” are masculine,
whereas up to this point the internal rhymes have been exclusively feminine.
This duality of internal rhymes, feminine and masculine, seems to reflect the
two figures: the speaker and Annabel Lee. Bolton consistently provides a psy-
chological explanation for the increasing number of repetitions and internal
rhymes in the second part of the poem, noting that “there is a process of accel-
eration here, as if the narrator’s thoughts and words intensify over the course
of the poem.”40
Furthermore, the whole stanza is saturated with alliteration, which
results from the insistent repetition of B and D in the word-initial positions:
“beams,” “bringing,” “beautiful” (repeated twice), “bright,” and “bride,” as well
as “dreams,” “down,” and “darling” (repeated twice). But the crucial distinctive
feature of the phonetic orchestration of the last stanza, which spotlights the
shift in the structural principles of the poem’s organization, is the generation of
sound clusters based on recurring phonemes, consonants in combination with
vowels or diphthongs. Such derivational chains are similar in terms of compo-
sition but different in terms of ordering. The insistent groupings of phonemes
join together particular words and build new semantic relations between
them. To illustrate, in the first line of the last stanza the following sequence
is created “never beams . . . bringing . . . dreams,” that is, /’nevәr bi:mz . . .
‘brɪɳɪɳ . . . dri:mz/. The phonemic cluster /rbi:/ in /nevər bi:mz/ is reflected in
/brɪ/ in “bringing”; furthermore, “beams,” /bi:mz/, appears to merge “bringing”
and “dreams,” /’brɪɳɪɳ . . . dri:mz /. The sonic similarity reinforces the seman-
tic bond between the effect, the speaker’s dreams of Annabel Lee, and their
cause, the moonbeams that bring them. Similarly, in the third line “rise but” is
reflected in the phonemic string generated by “bright eyes,” /raɪz bʌt . . . braɪt
aɪz/, underscoring the causative link between the rising stars and the eyes of the
speaker’s beloved with which they are associated in his mind.
Derived from the same phonemic nuclei and their permutations, these
sequences pave the way for the central paronomasia, which occurs in the fifth
and sixth line of the last stanza, to crown all the phonosemantic phenomena
shaping the poem up to this point:

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride.

Any analysis of paronomasia in poetry must proceed from a proper recognition

of recurring sound combinations. What is striking in these lines is the heavy

118 Sławomir Studniarz

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 118 27/03/15 6:30 AM

 accumulation of words containing the diphthong /aɪ/, as many as six in each of
these two lines:

/ən səʊ ɔ:l ðə naɪt taɪd aɪ laɪ dəʊn baɪ ðə saɪd

ɒv maɪ dɑ:rlɪɳ maɪ dɑ:rlɪɳ maɪ laɪf ən maɪ braɪd./

What is more, the phonemic string /aɪd/ contained in /taɪd/, /laɪ dəʊn/, and
/saɪd/ in the fifth line, is also present in the sixth line, in the cluster generated by
“my darling”/, maɪ dɑ:rlɪɳ/, which is repeated twice, and “bride”/, braɪd/. Thus
the link between these lines, established by the rhyme “side—bride” is rein-
forced by the phonetic orchestration, the recurring phonemic sequences /aɪ/
and /aɪd/. The phonological underpinning of the sixth line, the cluster /maɪd/,
emerges from the sequences “my darling” (twice) and as the phonetic blend
of “my bride,” /maɪ braɪd/. This gives rise in this line to an important parono-
mastic string: /maɪ d . . . Maɪ d . . . Maɪ braɪd/. The recurrent cluster /maɪd/ is
a slightly distorted echo of /meɪdən/, which clearly refers to the speaker’s dead
mistress, Annabel Lee; he speaks of her as “maiden” in the third and fifth line of
the first stanza. This produces a chain of synonymous expressions for Annabel
Lee: “maiden,” “darling,” and “bride.” The middle term, “darling,” /dɑ:r/, appears
as a distorted inversion of “bride,” minus the initial B: /raɪd/. The last compo-
nent, that is, /braɪd/, blends the consonants B, D, and R alliterated in the initial
four lines, and the diphthong /aɪ/. All these observations lead to an important
conclusion—thanks to paronomasia the figure of Annabel Lee becomes associ-
ated with the specific phonemic combinations /maɪ/ and /aɪd/.
It is by no means accidental that both of these clusters, ascribed to the speak-
er’s lost lover, /maɪ/ and /aɪd/, contain the diphthong /aɪ/, which in the English
language functions also independently as the pronoun “I,” and in the poem
clearly stands for the speaker himself. Thus the speaker, by virtue of paronoma-
sia, is included in the phonemic strings denoting Annabel Lee. The diphthong /
aɪ/ occurs six times in the fifth line, describing the action of the speaker (“I lie
down by the side”), and six times in the sixth line of the last stanza, devoted to
his dead lover referred to as “my darling—my life and my bride.” The similarity
of the sound orchestration and the paronomastic inclusion of the speaker in
the phonemic combinations representing his dead lover, /maɪ/ and /aɪd/, estab-
lishes the union between the speaker and his Annabel Lee. Their unity is fas-
tened by the paronomastic equation between “I” /aɪ/, “my” /maɪ/, and “bride” /
braɪd/, which are blended in /maɪd/. The way for their ultimate union has been
paved by the internal rhymes “beams—dreams” and “rise—eyes,” both featuring
the hidden reference to the speaker, “me,” /mi:/, inversely reflected in “beams”

Sonority and Semantics in “Annabel Lee” 119

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 119 27/03/15 6:30 AM

 and “dreams,” the latter preceded by the direct mention of the speaker (“me
dreams”), and “I” contained in “bright eyes” and “rise,” while semantically the
lines in question focus on the figure of Annabel Lee, with the verb “feel,” in
“I feel the bright eyes,” as the reversed sonic image of “Lee.”
These phonosemantic processes render, on the level of sound organization
of the poem, the union of the lovers’ souls. No force can undo this perfect and
indissoluble spiritual bond, whether God or the devil, which is so poignantly
stated earlier, in the fifth stanza:

And neither the angels in Heaven above,

Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

Their spiritual union is envisaged as an ideal order and perfect harmony

that overcomes the chaos and disruption, the emptying of values, caused
by the unnatural and abrupt death of Annabel Lee. The restoration of the
speaker’s axiological order, anchored in his absolute and unceasing devotion
to the object of his love, is reflected in the versification of the second part
of the poem, determining the significance of the emerging regular anapestic
meter. A first glimpse of the emerging prosodic order can be seen in the
fifth stanza, where the opening line, “But our love it was stronger by far than
the love,” contains twelve syllables and four anapestic feet. It is followed by
the shorter line, “Of those who were older than we—,” which reestablishes the
familiar pattern of long lines alternating with short ones, but this regularity
is broken by the repetition of the short line, “Of many far wiser than we—.”
As this instance of the momentarily disturbed regularity clearly demonstrates,
striving for ultimate harmony and order is set back here by the reference to the
external world, by the attempt to measure the love that unites the speaker and
Annabel Lee against the common love, of which are capable “those who were
wiser and older.”
However, order is triumphantly restored in the line exalting the beauty
of the dead mistress, in the metrically “pure” final line of the fifth stanza: “Of
the béautiful Ánnabel Lée,” ssS ssS ssS. It is “pure” because it contains three
anapestic feet without any iambs. This evocation of the beauty of the speaker’s
lover is repeated verbatim twice in the final stanza, in the second and in the
fourth line, replacing the refrain “In this kingdom by the sea.” This move sug-
gests that the ecstatic vision of the beautiful Annabel Lee brought about by
the moon and by the stars, metonymically standing for the whole universe,

120 Sławomir Studniarz

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 120 27/03/15 6:30 AM

 blinds the speaker to the surrounding world—for him, the land in which he
lives virtually ceases to exist. In the final two lines, “the kingdom by the sea” is
replaced by “her sepulchre there by the sea” and the synonymous expression
“her tomb by the sounding sea.” The substitution signifies that in the speaker’s
mind the external reality is reduced to the burial site of his beloved, the site
which is metonymically identified with his dead lover. Distinct alliteration of
the sonorant S in these expressions reveals its onomatopoeic character, because
the recurring initial S renders the swoosh of the surf; what is more, the poem
self-referentially identifies its function in the phrase “sounding sea.”
The speaker’s apotheosis, attained through love transcending the contin-
gencies and adversities of existence, and defying even supernatural decrees,
and the consequent restitution of the axiological order, finds its perfect real-
ization in the artistic order of the poem, in the rich patterning of the sound
structure of the final stanza and in its versification. The opening four lines,
distinguished by the rhyme pattern xbxb from the final four lines, ccbb, reveal
the sequence of neatly arranged longer and shorter lines. This confirms the
previously established pattern, but for the first time in the poem the number
of syllables in a line is in the right proportion to the number of stresses. The
longer lines contain exactly twelve syllables carrying four stresses, and the
shorter lines consist of exactly nine syllables carrying three stresses. Stress dis-
tribution shows that the underlying metrical pattern is anapestic, tetrameter
alternating with trimeter. The twice-repeated line, “Of my beáutiful Ánnabel
Lée,” is built on the anapestic trimeter, ssS ssS ssS, but the division between
the first and the second foot falls within the adjective “beautiful,” and the divi-
sion between the second and the third one, within “Annabel.” Four anapestic
feet make up the initial line of the stanza, and here again the foot bound-
ary occurs within a lexical item, in the participle “bringing”: “brínging me
dréams.” However, the perfect embodiment of anapestic tetrameter can be
found in the third line, “And the stárs never ríse, but I féel the bright éyes,”
ssS ssS ssS ssS, where the division between the feet exactly corresponds to the
division between the words. Traditionally, such meter is said to exhibit diaer-
esis, in contrast to caesura, which occurs when foot divisions do not coincide
with word divisions.41 Corn proposes another pair of terms to replace these
traditional and potentially misleading designations, namely, disjunctive feet,
“where foot divisions coincide with word-ends,” and connective feet, “where
foot divisions fall between syllables of different words.”42 Thus the line in ques-
tion is built on disjunctive feet, and the metrical units here perfectly coin-
cide with the lexical and syntactic units. Nothing then interferes here with the
metrical pattern.

Sonority and Semantics in “Annabel Lee” 121

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 121 27/03/15 6:30 AM

 Anapestic tetrameter shapes also the lines that describe the speaker’s
nocturnal sojourns in Annabel Lee’s mausoleum:

And so, áll the night-tíde, I lie dówn by the síde

Of my dárling—my daŕling—my lífe and my bríde.

But in this case punctuation marks, commas and dashes, impose another
division within these lines. The commas in the fifth line and the dashes in the
sixth line seem to interfere with the strict metrical pattern established earlier in
this stanza. But do they?
Carper and Attridge argue that punctuation does not affect the meter in
a poem: “We can, if we wish, observe the dashes as brief silences in our per-
formances, but it must be recognized that such dramatic breaks have no effect
whatsoever on the underlying meter.”43 Thus the emphatic assertion that the
speaker visits the tomb every night requires placing stress on “all,” which over-
rides the division between “And so” and “all” imposed by a comma and creates
an initial anapest. There is no denying, however, that the line ends with the
sequence of two disjunctive anapestic feet: “I lie dówn by the síde.” In the sub-
sequent line the second anapest is formed by the second syllable of “darling,”
the pronoun “my” and the first syllable of the repeated “darling”; in addition,
this anapestic foot is graphically split by the first dash, “ling—my daŕ.” A foot
boundary in fact occurs twice within the word “darling,” and the second dash
visually separates the first and the second unstressed syllable of the third ana-
pest, “ling—my lífe.” By contrast, the line ends with an ideal disjunctive anapes-
tic foot, “and my bríde.”
The integrity of the lexical items and the syntactic links between them
seem to pose a threat to the manifest metrical order. However, it is reason-
able to conclude that the anapestic meter so strongly asserting its presence in
the last stanza embodies in the poem’s prosodic structure perfect harmony
and order, but the attainment of this exalted condition, of this ideal order,
requires overcoming the resistance of the natural order of language, of the
lexical items and the syntactic division reinforced here by the punctuation
marks. Can this be seen as the metrical equivalent of the spiritual triumph of
the speaker’s love, conquering all the earthly and unearthly impediments, his
rising above the natural order in his transcendent devotion to his beautiful
Annabel Lee?
In order to resolve this question conclusively, the last two lines of the poem
need to be considered, too. In the version of the poem designated by Mabbott

122 Sławomir Studniarz

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 122 27/03/15 6:30 AM

 as A, dating from May 1849, and generally taken to be the authoritative one,
these lines read as follows:

In her sépulchre thére by the séa

In her tómb by the soúnding séa.

The poem ends, quite unexpectedly, with an iambic foot, which spoils the
anapestic trimeter established in the preceding line. But the tighter rhythm of
the last line makes for a stronger sense of closure. It is revealing to examine at
this point the last version of the poem prepared by Poe in September 1849, which
features a rather drastic revision of the final line, restoring at the end the perfect
anapestic trimeter, a sequence of three disjunctive feet: “In her tómb by the síde
of the séa.” Curiously enough, the phrase “by the side of the sea” seems to have
been derived from the refrain of the poem “The Mourner,” frequently cited as
one of the possible sources for “Annabel Lee.” Mabbott states in the notes to the
poem that “[i]t is generally agreed that Poe’s final phrasing ‘side of the sea’ is infe-
rior to the earlier ‘sounding seas’ in this line” and explains that “[t]he reason for
the change was probably to obtain greater metrical regularity.”44 It appears, then,
that this authorial change, together with the elimination of the dashes in the sixth
line of the final stanza, represents the attempt to emphatically assert the perfect
metrical organization emerging toward the end of the poem, through which the
speaker’s apotheosis and the reconstituted order and harmony are embodied in
the very substance of the poem itself, also in the perfect symmetry of rhyme
pattern in the final four lines, embodying the sequence of two rhymed couplets.
In a final analysis, it appears that the division of the poem into two parts,
distinguished by their contrastive structural principles on the level of stanza
construction, sound patterning, rhyme, and meter, marks the two stages in the
development of its argumentative and semantic thrust. The first part, narrative
in its character, sketches in the scene and delineates the sequence of events lead-
ing to the disastrous death of Annabel Lee, while the second, introduced by the
contrastive “But,” shows the speaker’s refusal to accept the fact and the power of
his love, which enables him to rise above the devastating loss and reach a sort of
apotheosis, embodied in the richly orchestrated, incantatory, ecstatic anapestic
lines of the final stanza. The love that binds the speaker and his beloved opposes
both the natural and supernatural order. This perfect and indissoluble spiri-
tual bond is conveyed by the central paronomasia that crowns all the phonose-
mantic processes occurring in the poem. The union of their souls is rendered
by the paronomastic inclusion of the speaker in his dead mistress. And the

Sonority and Semantics in “Annabel Lee” 123

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 123 27/03/15 6:30 AM

 phonological welding of the figures of the speaker and Annabel Lee reflects in
the material substance of the poem the crucial action of his every night “lying
down by the side of his bride,” the proof of his unceasing devotion.
This meticulous, perhaps even tedious for some, analysis of the poem’s
particular prosodic, phonetic, and constructional patterning, and the results
thus obtained, may well offer insights into the general principles accounting for
the unique and distinctive quality of Poe’s verse. Far from being an exceptional
case, the careful artistic design of “Annabel Lee” may be treated as an example
of the larger tendency in his poetic works, illustrative of the way in which both
the metrical organization and the sound texture contribute to the development
of ideas in Poe’s poetry. Thus it is hoped that the narrow scope of the present
study is redeemed by the possible larger application, in the realm of Poe studies,
both of its method and of its findings.

Notes

1. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Rationale of Verse,” in Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thomp-
son (New York: Library of America, 1984), 573. Subsequent references to works collected
in Essays and Reviews will be cited parenthetically as Essays.
2. Andrzej Zgorzelski, “Sound and Sense: On the Phonosemantic Analysis of Poetry,”
in Perspectives on Literature and Culture, ed. Leszek S. Kolek et al. (Lublin: Wydawnic-
two UMCS, 2004), 335.
3. Ibid., 336.
4. Yuri Lotman, Analysis of the Poetic Text, trans. D. Barton Johnson (Ann Arbor,
Mich.: Ardis, 1976), 40.
5. Ibid., 47.
6. Ibid., 120.
7. Ibid., 46.
8. Ibid., 126.
9. Jurij Łotman, Struktura tekstu artystycznego, trans. Anna Tanalska (Warsaw: PIW,
1984), 216.
10. Lotman, Analysis of the Poetic Text, 141.
11. Reuven Tsur, “Contrast, Ambiguity, Double-Edgedness,” Poetics Today, 6, no. 3
(1985): 417.
12. Ibid.
13. Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Modern Criticism and Theory, ed.
David Lodge (Harlow, U.K.: Pearson Education, 1988), 46.
14. Ibid., 49.
15. Following Jakobson, paronomasia is understood as a device that binds semantically
words which are close in terms of sonority.
16. Dwayne Thorpe, “The Poems, 1836–1849,” in A Companion to Poe Studies, ed. Eric
W. Carlson (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), 59.
17. Kent P. Ljungquist, “Edgar Allan Poe,” in Prospects for the Study of American
Literature: A Guide for Scholars and Students, ed. Richard Kopley (New York: New York
University Press, 1997), 39.

124 Sławomir Studniarz

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 124 27/03/15 6:30 AM

 18. Scott Peeples, The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House,
2004), 83.
19. Robert Evans, “The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe: Their Critical Reception,” in Criti-
cal Insights: The Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Steven Frye (Salem, Mass.: Salem Press,
2010), n.p.
20. Ibid.
21. Aldous Huxley, “Vulgarity in Literature,” in Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed.
Robert Regan (Englewood Cliffs, Calif.: Prentice Hall, 1967), 34.
22. Ibid., 32.
23. Ibid.
24. Richard Fletcher, The Stylistic Development of Edgar Allan Poe (The Hague:
Mouton, 1973), 62 (emphasis added).
25. Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” in Bloom’s Classic Critical Views: Edgar Allan Poe,
ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase, 2008), xi.
26. Daniel Hoffman, “Edgar Allan Poe: The Artist of the Beautiful,” American Poetry
Review 24, no. 6 (1995): 11.
27. Shira Volosky, “Edgar Allan Poe: Repetition, Women, and Signs,” in The Cam-
bridge History of American Literature: Nineteenth-Century Poetry, 1800–1910, 4 vols.,
vol. 4, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 277.
28. Floyd Stovall, “Mood Meaning, and Form in Poe’s Poetry,” in Edgar Poe the Poet:
Essays New and Old on the Man and His Work (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 1969), 225.
29. Edward Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press,
1966), 98.
30. Richard Wilbur, “Notes,” in The Laurel Poetry Series: Poe, ed. Richard Wilbur (New
York: Dell, 1959), 151.
31. Thomas Carper and Derek Attridge, Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to
Rhythm in Poetry (New York: Routledge, 2003), 97.
32. Alfred Corn, The Poem’s Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody (Port Townsend, Wash.:
Copper Canyon Classics, 2008), 51.
33. Thorpe, “Poems,” 103.
34. Ibid., 104.
35. The last stanza quoted here comes from the version of the poem designated by
Mabbott as A and generally accepted as the authoritative one. It differs from the final
version of the poem, which dates from September 1849, Mabbott’s E, in one important
respect: the last verse reads there “In her tomb by the side of the sea.” The consequences
of this alteration are discussed below.
36. Thomas Olive Mabbott, ed., Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Poems (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2000), 469.
37. Marina Tarlinskaja, “What Is ‘Metricality’?: English Iambic Pentameter,” in For-
mal Approaches to Poetry: Recent Developments in Metrics, ed. B. Elan Dresher and Nila
Friedberg (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006), 62.
38. Corn, Poem’s Heartbeat, 42.
39. Matthew Bolton, “Rhyme and Reason in Poe and His Predecessors,” in Critical
Insights, ed. Frye, 60.
40. Ibid., 61.
41. Corn, Poem’s Heartbeat, 64.
42. Ibid.
43. Carper and Attridge, Meter and Meaning, 53.
44. Mabbott, Edgar Allan Poe, 481.

Sonority and Semantics in “Annabel Lee” 125

This content downloaded from 88.156.5.43 on Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:47:17 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

EAPR 16.1_08_Studniarz.indd 125 27/03/15 6:30 AM

View publication stats