An Analysis of Annabel Lee :: Annabel Lee Essays

  An analytic thinking of Annabel Lee          Most people agree that Edgar Allan Poe wrote Annabel Lee about his gone(a) wife, Virginia Clemm, who died of tuberculosis two years earlier. Some critics, however, contend that in the seventh line of the poem he states, I was a child and she was a child, and he certainly was no child in 1836 at 27 when he married his thirteen-year-old bride. Maybe the poem is about an earlier hunch, or perhaps it is purely fictional, but addressing Annabel Lee as his life and his bride in line thirty-eight and writing it two years after his pricey young wifes death, it is seems logical that it is indeed written about her and is simply embellished with a bit of poetic license. In this poem, Poe writes primarily with a combination of iambic and anapestic feet, alternating between tetra rhythm and trimeter. The word chilling, however, is permitted in both places it is used, lines fifteen and twenty-five, to retain its jarring trochaic meter (one stressed syllable followed by an light syllable). This is done most probably to utilize the provoking effect of that meter the death of the speakers loved one disturbs the rhythm of the poem and startles the reader. End hoar in the poem alternates lines with a few variations and bears little significance the repeat rhyming words are Lee, sea, me, and we. In Annabel Lee the speaker argues in lines eleven and twelve that the angels were jealous of the happy couple the winged seraphs of paradise coveted her and me. The envious angels, he insists, caused the wind to chill his bride and seize her life. However, he contends, their love, stronger than the love of the older or wiser couples, can never be conquered And incomplete the angles in heaven above, Nor the demons down under the sea, Can ever tell my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee. (lines 33-36) The poems diction immerses the reader into the speakers fantasy-like realm of love shared with his bride. He begins the poem with the first two lines, It was umpteen and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea, lots like the once upon a time, in a faraway worldly concern of fairytales. The couple lived with no other thought than to love one other and loved with a love that was more than love (9).