Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
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.
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
Annabel Lee by everything, including the moon and the stars, and at night, he
Analysis
Edgar Allan Poe wrote "Annabel Lee" in May 1849, a few months before his
November 1849. Although the poem may refer to a number of women in Poe's
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
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
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
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
narrator of "Annabel Lee" chooses ironically to lie down and sleep next to a
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
Although not all of Poe's protagonists in his poems show clear signs of madness,
"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
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