Annabel Lee
ANNABEL LEE BY : EDGAR ALLAN POE
Annabel Lee” takes up a common subject in Edgar Allan Poe’s writing: the death of a beautiful young woman. It portrays this as the most tragic death of all—robbing the world of youth, beauty and innocence. The tragedy of this loss is mostly explored through the portrayal of the narrator's grief, which colors every line of the poem. The poem shows the way grief attaches itself to a person and refuses to let go, an experience intensified here by the added tragedy of a life cut short. The poem doesn’t make a clear, neat argument about death and grief—and in a way, that’s the point. Grief is disorientating and overpowering, and the poem embodies this from start to finish.
The speaker is completely defined by the death of his lover. They were children when they met and the speaker seems to have remained locked in this childhood love throughout his life. That is, as the poem unfolds line after line, it becomes clear that there's only one thought in the speaker's mind: "the beautiful Annabel Lee." This grief defines not just the speaker's past, but his present and future as well. To him, the entire world and all of nature are nothing more than reminders of Annabel Lee: the chilly atmosphere of moonbeams, starlight and the sea are all eternally linked to his lover. As he tells the reader, his soul will never "dissever" from Annabel Lee's; that is, he will be connected to her forever, which means that grief will rule his world forever. The state of grief is presented as being just as unchangeable as the state of death. That's why every other line either ends in "Annabel Lee" or rhymes with her name—the speaker's mind keeps circling back to the trauma of losing someone so young and beautiful. At play here, too, is the Romantic idea of innocence. Annabel Lee's youth and beauty make her pure, and her death both compounds the poem's sense of tragedy and preserves her in this eternal youthful beauty.
Another key element of the poem is the way in which the narrator's grief seems to have no possible outlet. Whereas some grief-stricken people might turn to family or spirituality for solace, the narrator can do no such thing. Any possible comfort from religion has been destroyed by the angels' role in Annabel Lee's death—he believes that their jealousy and malice killed her. Likewise, if "highborn kinsmen" (line 17) is taken to refer to Annabel Lee's family, the narrator has no positive connection with them either; he mentions only that they took her away. He also disparages the "older" and "wiser" people in his world (lines 28-29), saying that they wouldn't understand the perfect young love he shared with Annabel Lee. In other words, he is entirely isolated—suggesting perhaps that the pain of losing a loved one can be made even worse by feeling alone in that pain.
The poem ultimately seems to suffocate under the pressure of this endless grief, with no suggestion of a way out. In fact, the poem’s conclusion shows the speaker’s environment merging with his grief. The moon and the stars exist only to bring back memories of Annabel Lee. The sea, too, is defined by his grief—its constant “sounding” underscoring the eternal silence of his deceased lover. In the end, the speaker says that he joins Annabel Lee in her tomb, and though it's unclear whether he does so literally or only figuratively (by feeling as if he is lying there beside her), it's nonetheless certain that the speaker is emotionally imprisoned by his grief.
