Annabel Lee

By opening “Annabel Lee” with the lines, “It was many and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea” (Lines 1-2), Poe creates a sense that the reader has entered the world of a classical fairy tale. This sense is furthered with mention of a “maiden” (Line 3) who inhabits the kingdom. When coupled with the use of a simple rhyme scheme, this allusion to fantasy stories appears to prepare the reader for a traditional children’s story where at the close of the tale, everyone will live “happily ever after.”

However, matters considerably darken in the second stanza, as the young couple experience love for one another on such a heightened plane that the “winged seraphs of Heaven / Coveted [the pair]” (Lines 11-12). Given that angels—typically used to symbolize innocence, sanctity, and grace—are instead driven by apparent cruelty, jealousy and rage, “Annabel Lee” develops into something far different than a fairy tale; it becomes instead a gothic romance whose images of violence, depression, and ghosts create a haunted, despairing tone, which maintains for the rest of the poem.

As the narrator continues to insist that the angels were directly responsible for the death of his beloved, by the third stanza, any pretense the reader has of the narrator’s omniscient authority is abandoned. The reader becomes aware that they are instead in the presence of an unreliable narrator so traumatized by the death of his love that it is difficult—if not impossible—to tell whether his version of events can be trusted.

In fact, the fourth stanza causes the reader to wonder whether the narrator might have gone mad as a result of his loss—“Yes!—that was the reason” (Line 23)—which would explain his belief that not only was Annabel Lee’s death the result of occult causes, but that this is a fact “all men know” (Line 23). The narrator even goes so far as to claim that the jealous angels, so overwhelmed with their envy, could not possibly be as joyous in heaven as he and Annabel Lee were in their deep love.

In the poem’s fifth stanza, with Poe’s signature poetic musicality on full display, the narrator refuses to submit to a despairing nihilism—“But our love it was stronger by far than the love / Of those who were older than we…” (Lines 27-28)—and instead the reader finds him insisting that no matter what forces may be arrayed against himself and his (now departed) beloved, nothing can “ever dissever my soul from the soul / Of the beautiful Annabel Lee” (Lines 32-33).

The refusal to fully surrender to grief resonates in the poem’s final stanza, though it also contains images of such darkness that the reader must continue questioning the narrator’s sanity (“I lie down by the side / Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, / in her sepulchre [sic] there by the sea”) (Lines 38-40). In fact, aspects of the concluding stanza are both emotionally restorative and thrillingly romantic—a paradox perhaps best summed up by literary critic Thomas Ollive Mabbot, who writes: “In Poe’s masterpieces the double contents of his temper, of his mind, and of his art are fused into a oneness of tone, structure and movement.” (“Edgar Allan Poe.” Britannica). In other words, “Annabel Lee” does what so much of Poe’s greatest work was able to do: balance extreme opposites with a rare ease, regardless of the genre or time period in which Poe was working.