18 pages • 36 minutes read
Edgar Allan PoeAnnabel Lee
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1849A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“Annabel Lee” is comprised of six stanzas, all of which rely on irregular rhyme schemes—the long lines are often unrhymed, while the short lines always rhyme—which creates a unique tension between the work’s structural tendencies and its emotional free-spiritedness throughout the poem. In addition, with Poe’s consistent metrical employment of anapests (two unstressed syllables succeeded by a stressed syllable) and iambs (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable), “Annabel Lee” is a poem which—as enjoyable as it is to read silently upon the page—is thrilling to read (or hear read) aloud.
A unique component of the form of “Annabel Lee” is the fact that each of the poem’s six stanzas comprise a complete sentence. In other words, the poem is six sentences long, and each of those sentences successfully employ enjambment in order to help create drama and tension at key moments in each of the stanzas.
Finally, the form of “Annabel Lee” is one of the earlier instances of narrative poetry in 19th century American poetry: It tells the complete—from beginning to end—story of its central characters in a compressed space.
Narrative Voice
To say that the narrator in “Annabel Lee” is one of the most memorable in all of American poetry would perhaps still be understating the point. Indeed, the poem’s narrator—though certainly emotional, possibly hysterical, and probably mentally ill—is possessed of a visionary, prophetic voice imbuing his words with the type of authoritative voice seen in the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, or other sacred religious texts.
Certainly, the narrator’s fallibility makes it difficult to fully trust his version of events, yet the power of his telling is such that one cannot help but be swept up in his narrative. Like Annabel Lee herself, the reader becomes a figurative prisoner—as shut up in the metaphorical coffin of Poe’s poem as she is in her literal seaside coffin.
Antagonist
It cannot be overstated how unusual it is for a poem to feature as its—assumed—villains the angels of heaven. Indeed, even in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan (the most famous of fallen angels) is possessed of a three-dimensional character making it impossible for the reader not to empathize with him.
Yet in “Annabel Lee,” the angels are not only flat characters, they are also flat characters whose sole quality is—according to the narrator—their insatiable, burning jealousy toward the happiness they witness in the lovers. In this way, one can see the angels as having as much in common with Gollum (yet another figure pathologically obsessed with a single overriding object) in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
Most disturbingly—and most fittingly, considering Poe’s gothic tendencies—these angels are never punished by God or any other celestial beings. They appear to get away with the murder they have committed and get to go on with their stations in paradise without any apparent blowback as a result of their transgression. Perhaps more than any other single feature of the poem, this is what makes “Annabel Lee” such an enduring classic in the horror genre.
Related Titles
By Edgar Allan Poe
