Poe's Annabel Lee

(1849)
It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may
know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other
thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
She was a child and I was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea:
But we loved with a love that was more than
love—
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of
heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the
love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
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:
For the moon never beams, without bringing me
dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
 “the death, then, of a beautiful woman is,
unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the
world –and equally is it beyond doubt that the
lips best suited for such topic are those of a
bereaved lover.” (Poe “The Philosophy of
Composition”
 The poet wrote to a friend:
“Each time I felt all the agonies of her death —
and at each accession of the disorder I loved her
more dearly & clung to her life with more
desperate pertinacity. But I am constitutionally
sensitive — nervous in a very unusual degree. I
became insane, with long intervals of horrible
sanity.”
 The traditional view of Poe as the “jingle man,”
supposedly preoccupied with musical and
metrical effects for their own sake.
 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.
 a wealth of hypnotic rhythm and song-like
rhyme. It has a fairytale air.
 The rhythms and rhyme reflect the speaker's
obsession with his childhood love; they are
often repeated which helps to reinforce the
spiritual connection (whilst echoing the waves
and motion of the sea) which is deep and
profound.
 The basic theme is that of true love being
able to transcend death; nothing can keep
these two souls apart, not even supernatural
forces. The two lived for love, for one
another. As they lived, so shall they die, next
to each other forever.
 rhyme scheme: ababcb dbebfb abgbhbib fbabjb
ebbebkb lbmbnnbb.
 distant connections (repeating certain rhymes
over different stanzas) helps create the
atmosphere of feelings, first fading then
returning, only to finally disappear.
 There are also unrhymed end words in each of
the stanzas.
 Why did Edgar Allan Poe leave these lines
floating, without a rhyming partner or repeated
rhyme? Poetically, they perhaps represent the
idea of loss, of being alone in all that familiarity.
They are outside of the phonic framework.
 Poe's critique is made evident when he
"neglect[s] principal elements of the
consolation literature of the time, especially
its doting on the death of children, its
delineation of Christian ideas of heaven, and
its pervasive moralism.
 the poem is subverting conventional ideas
regarding death, mourning and the afterlife by
having the speaker favour a "purely imaginative
rather than religious context," one in which
"envious angels in heaven killed his child-love,"
and in which his perpetual connection to her is
not grounded in a cultural and religious
understanding of death as a sphere of divine
reunion but in the notion "that neither heaven's
angels nor hell's demons can separate him from
her, since he sleeps with her . . . each night in
her tomb by the sea."
 "Annabel Lee" critiques sentimental culture
and literature through the "bizarre behaviours
... [of a ] husband who nightly sleeps with
Annabel Lee in her tomb," and by having
"Annabel Lee appear [as] ... the victim of both
angels and demons or of angels as demons.“
 Poe himself participated in such cultural
practice when he clipped locks of Virginia's
hair after her death and kept them bound in a
sheaf of paper.
 Poe is side by side with Annabel Lee, keeping
the spiritual ties alive, transforming his
childhood love into something universal,
something everyone might know.
 In addition to the fairytale like rhyme and
rhythm, there is a sense of the supernatural
set up in this poem, with angelic and
demonic order attempting to separate the
two lovers
 Annabel Lee remains as one of his attempts
to preserve his ideal love.
 The kingdom, the sea, the angles, the
sepulchre, Annabel Lee, the highborn
kinsmen, the moon and stars

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(1849)

It was many and many a year ago,

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