Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee

Edgar Allan Poe was a 19th century poet best known for his dark, short stories and poems. The
recurring theme in most of his work is the tragic separation of lovers through death. His plots,
though short, usually give insight into the deteriorating psyche of the lover left behind to suffer
alone. Annabel Lee is one such poem that describes the passion and devotion of one man for his
dead wife.

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.
I was a child and she 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 high-born kinsmen 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 one 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 the sepulchre there by the sea –
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
Summary:

Long ago, "in a kingdom by the sea," lived Annabel Lee, who loved the narrator.

Both she and the narrator were children but knew love more powerful than that of

the angels, who envied them. A wind chilled and killed Annabel, but their love

was too strong to be defeated by angels or demons. The narrator is reminded of

Annabel Lee by everything, including the moon and the stars, and at night, he

lies by her tomb by the sea.

Analysis

Edgar Allan Poe wrote "Annabel Lee" in May 1849, a few months before his

death, and it first appeared in The Southern Literary Messenger posthumously in

November 1849. Although the poem may refer to a number of women in Poe's

life, most acknowledge it to be in memory of Virginia Clemm, Poe's wife who

married him at the age of thirteen and who died in 1847 before she turned

twenty-five. The work returns to Poe's frequent fixation with the Romantic image

of a beautiful woman who has died too suddenly in the flush of youth. As

indicated more thoroughly in his short story "The Oval Portrait," Poe often

associated death with the freezing and capturing of beauty, and many of his

heroines reach the pinnacle of loveliness on their deathbed, as with Ligeia of the

eponymous story.

The poem specifically mentions the youth of the unnamed narrator and especially

of Annabel Lee, and it celebrates child-like emotions in a way consistent with the

ideals of the Romantic era. Many Romantics from the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries viewed adulthood as a corruption of the purer instincts of childhood,

and they preferred nature to society because they considered it to be a better

and more instinctive state. Accordingly, Poe treats the narrator's childhood love

for Annabel Lee as fuller and more eternal than the love of adults. Annabel Lee is

gentle and persistent in her love, and she has no complex emotions that may

darken or complicate her love.

The poem's setting has several Gothic elements, as the kingdom by the sea is

lonely and in an undefined but mysterious location. Poe does not describe the

setting with any specificity, and he weaves a hazy, romantic atmosphere around

the kingdom until he ends by offering the stark and horrific image of a "sepulchre

there by the sea." The location by the sea recalls the city of "The City in the Sea,"

which is also located by the sea and which is conceptually connected to death

and decay. At the same time, the nostalgic tone and the Gothic background

serve to inculcate the image of a love that outlasts all opposition, from the

spiritual jealousy of the angels to the physical barrier of death. Although Annabel

Lee has died, the narrator can still see her "bright eyes," an image of her soul

and of the spark of life that gives a promise of a future meeting between the two

lovers.

As in the case of a number of Poe's male protagonists who mourn the premature

death of beloved women, the love of narrator of "Annabel Lee" goes beyond

simple adoration to a more bizarre attachment. Whereas Annabel Lee seems to

have loved him in a straightforward, if nonsexual, manner, the protagonist has

mentally deified her. He blames everyone but himself for her death, pointing at

the conspiracy of angels with nature and at the show of paternalism inherent in

her "highborn kinsmen" who "came and bore her away," and he remains

dependent upon her memory. While the narrator of the poem "Ulalume" suffers

from an unconscious need to grieve and to return to Ulalume's grave, the

narrator of "Annabel Lee" chooses ironically to lie down and sleep next to a

woman who is herself lying down by the sea.

The name "Annabel Lee" continues the pattern of a number of Poe's names for

his dead women in that it contains the lulling but melancholy "L" sound.

Furthermore, "Annabel Lee" has a peaceful, musical rhythm which reflects the

overall musicality of the poem, which makes heavy use of the refrain phrases "in

this kingdom by the sea" and "of the beautiful Annabel Lee," as well as of the

repetition of other words. In particular, although the poem's stanzas have a

somewhat irregular length and structure, the rhyme scheme continually

emphasizes the three words "me," "Lee," and "sea," enforcing the linked nature

of these concepts within the poem while giving the poem a song-like sound.

Many of Poe's short stories are effective in their portrayal of terror and madness

precisely because the narrators of these stories cannot be trusted to tell the truth.

For instance, the narrators of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat" insist

upon their sanity as a preface before providing a chilling interpretation of the

criminal mind, while the protagonist's opium addiction in "Ligeia" casts doubts

upon the extent of the supernatural in his experiences after the death of his first

wife Ligeia. In all cases, Poe employs the first-person point of view in order to

prevent knowledge of other potential points of view. Similarly, although Poe's

poetic works are less focused on murder than many of his short stories,

questions about the supernatural and about reality continue to pervade our

understanding of Poe's poems, many of which are also told in the first person.

In Poe's works, a standard sign of the narrator's possible lack of sanity is his

inability to question his own bizarre behavior. One of the clearest examples of

this disconnect between the rational mind and the obsessed mind appears in the

poem "Annabel Lee," where the narrator displays signs of paranoia in his

suspicions of a conspiracy between Annabel Lee's highborn kinsmen, the jealous

angels in Heaven, and nature itself in causing her death. Furthermore, he

concludes the poem in a peaceful and optimistic tone as he explains calmly that

he sleeps every night beside her tomb on the seashore. This detail reveals the

extent of his fixation upon her memory and causes us to suspect that his largely

sweet and innocent account of pure love actually hides a highly unbalanced mind.

In addition to omitting local explanations for abnormal behavior, Poe's unreliable

narrators often try to explain strange occurrences in a rational manner before

losing control over their thoughts and succumbing to the significance of the

supernatural. Just as the narrator of "The Black Cat" at first tries to find a

scientific cause for a number of sinister coincidences but later begins to believe
that the cat's soul has returned to haunt him, the narrator of "The Raven" initially

laughs at the raven, thinking its appearance to be an odd coincidence. However,

after he imagines that he hears the footfall of angels, his mood shifts instantly

and he loses his temper in his agony at memories of the lost Lenore. The sudden

nature of his mood swing and his subsequent detachment from reality

characterizes him as a man driven insane by grief.

Although not all of Poe's protagonists in his poems show clear signs of madness,

many do show elements of instability or of hallucinations. The narrator of

"Ulalume" speaks with his soul and imagines it to be a separate, female entity

named Psyche, while the knight of "Eldorado" encounters a "pilgrim shadow" and

curiously asks the shade for directions to a mythical city. Even those who seem

to be self-aware, such as Tamerlane in the eponymous poem, often display self-

serving biases -- although Tamerlane's egotistical absorption is hardly as severe

as the faults of others and may merely be the result of Poe's use of the first

person. Nevertheless, Poe's style of narration often leaves the matter of the

protagonist's trustworthiness open to interpretation and ultimately allows for a

darker understanding of his works.