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Annabel Lee Essay

Decent Essays

Love transcends death
In “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe and “How Do I Love Thee?” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning the authors approach and develop theme that love is unconditional.

In “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe, the author expresses his unconditional love for a woman named Annabel Lee. The author says things like, “We loved with a love that was more than love” to help express his love for her. This quote means that the word love doesn’t seem to describe his love for her. He also says things like, “The angels, not half so happy in Heaven.” He is saying that no one, not even angels are half as happy and in love as they are. The narrator has expressed his love for Annabel Lee in many ways.

In the second text, Elizabeth Barrett Browning establishes the theme that love transcends even death in her poem, “How Do I Love Thee.” This first becomes clear in the first stanza when she claims that her love will extend “when feeling out of sight / …show more content…

This transitions quickly to the future she paints in stanza three when she promises that her love will still be as passionate and fresh as “childhood’s faith” into her “old griefs” and age. She provides a sense of assurance to her lover in the line “I love thee with a love I seemed to lose / With my lost saints,” with the word “seemed,” indicating that he were to lose her, he would not lose her love. This theme is again strongly reinforced in the last couplet when she states and returns to a present tense “and, if God choose, / I shall but love thee better after death.” She returns to present tense to prove that even if one of them dies, she will love him even more. In her poem, Browning establishes the theme that love transcends

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