“We loved with a love that was more than love, I and my Annabel Lee.”(Poe 11-13) The speaker’s devotion to Annabel Lee was unlike many others definition of love. Nothing could come between them, not even death itself. In Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabel Lee”, he conveys the speaker’s everlasting affection toward Annabel Lee through the use of imagery and symbols. There are many instances in the text where the word or phrase is an example of imagery and symbolism. Like many of Poe’s works, “Annabel Lee” focuses heavily on the use of imagery to paint a vivid image in the readers mind. The phrase “Kingdom by the sea” is repeated many times throughout the poem and gives the reader a distinct illustration of the setting of the poem. The word kingdom gives the impression that the story takes place in a faraway land, long ago. Poe does not ever specifically describe the setting as to leave some of it up to the reader’s imagination. The next example, the angels, changes names many times in the poem. They go from being called …show more content…
“A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling my beautiful Annabel Lee” (Poe 15-16). The wind and the angels are both symbols of death. Angel are often thought in many religions to be the ones to usher you to heaven. In most cases they are seen as helpful guides but in this text they are viewed more as thieves. The speaker blames them for the death of his love. The sepulcher is a symbol of death as well, it is the physical thing that is keeping him from Annabel Lee. It stands for his inability to reach her; she is dead now and he can no longer be with her. The sea in the story is a symbol of his loneliness. In the beginning it seemed as though it were just him and Annabel Lee “In this Kingdom by the Sea” but once she is taken from him he is just left with the sea (Poe 9). The ocean is seen by many as a vast, empty, and unending space and that I show the speaker feels without his
Poe takes a quite different approach in expressing the same theme, the loss of a loved one, in Annabel Lee. While the tone is dark and somber in The Raven, the tone in Annabel Lee is loving at first, then as it
Poetic Qualities as Signs of Loss in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee”Edgar Allan Poe's classic poem, "Annabel Lee," is a very deep and emotional poem,clearly trying to convey a lot of universal emotion to his reader. During his lifetime, Poe had lost his young wife, his mother, and his stepmother, so in other words, many of the women that Poe had so loved in his life had died, and this was something that had deeply troubled Poe, leading him to an eventual state of depression. In the poem "Annabel Lee," many of these feelings of love and loss that Poe felt towards his wife and other women is all transmitted to the reader.Through the use of various forms of poetic qualities, tone, and imagery, Poe speaks about a universal theme of love and loss, inspired by his own experiences with the women he loved.Throughout the poem Annabel Lee, Poe seems to be utilizing a very dark, menacing,even vengeful sort of tone, and he does this through various means. One of the way he does this is by his word choice. He uses harsh words and phrases like "killing (line 26)," "shut her up,”(line 19) and "dissever my soul" (line 32) to accomplish this. Even though Poe is speaking about his love, he is nevertheless speaking in a very menacing sort of way. The hurt that he feels from her loss has impacted him deeply, he is all consumed by the darkness of her untimely death, as the reader also learns that she was young when she was taken away. This loss has driven the speaker to the point of anger and
In Poe’s other poem, Annabel Lee, Poe again explores the theme of death. The narrator is obsessed with how and why Annabel Lee died, and who he can blame for it. Both Annabel Lee and the narrator were children, but they “loved with a love that was more than love /…/ With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven / Coveted her and me.” [2] The narrator believed that the angels envied them so much that they sent down a wind that chilled Annabel Lee and killed her. “The angels, not half so happy in Heaven, / Went envying her and me - / Yes! - that was the reason (as all men know, In this kingdom by the see) / That the wind came out of the cloud by night, / Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.” [3] He is in grief and haunted by her death, and thinks that it was unjust that she should have been taken from him so abruptly, when they were still only children. Poe’s poem’s setting has
By repeating the phrase "of the beautiful Annabel Lee," Poe creates an obsessive persona of the speaker that can only focus on the beauty of his love and how his soul will never be torn from her. His torment and grief is so severe that spending his nights in the tomb of his love can only relieve his aching heart. His nighttime visits become ritualistic in nature, finding comfort in a corpse, an object that is most certainly not beautiful. Poe makes the speaker find comfort in the death of his love, because true beauty
“Annabel Lee,” is a poem composed by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s tragic love story begins in a kingdom by the sea. It describes a powerful love that was stopped too soon. The death of a beautiful woman, Annabel Lee, has left her lover mourning her death. Edgar Allan Poe uses archetypes to create a tone of anguish.
In life, as in death, Edgar Allan Poe evoked a feeling of sympathy from his
The third stanza clarifies what Poe meant when he said the "seraphs coveted" them by stating "this is the reason in the kingdom by the sea that a wind blew out of a cloud at night chilling thy Annabel Lee." By this point we don't know yet what exactly Poe means but we do know the fact that Annabel lee is chilled couldn't be good. Annabel Lee's "high-born kinsmen came and locked her up in a sepulchre in the kingdom by the sea. " Poe's use of the word sepulcher lets us know that
It is apparent from reading lines such as “the winds came out of a cloud, chilling My beautiful Annabel Lee” that Poe feels that he is somehow cursed and that the heavens stole his joy because the angels’ own discontent caused them to delight in destroying the happiness of others. This is further confirmed, and perhaps most overtly so, by the line, “The Angels, half so happy in Heaven, Went envying her and me”.
The poem, “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe, has a dark and eerie tone. This poem is so sullen and creepy because the narrator’s wife, Annabel Lee, was killed by the heinous, chilling winds that were dispatched by the angels. Her husband, who became a widower, wrote the poem beside Annabel Lee, who was dead in her tomb. This has a very dark and glum toon, which causes the reader to jump into a somber mood. The text states in a dreadful and shocking tone “that the wind came out of the cloud by night/chilling and killing my Annabel Lee” (Poe 25-26). The poem “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)” by E E Cummings, is a very powerful poem about love. It is mainly about a man who knows that his life is complete because he has his love by his side. Cummings uses passionate and warm hearted words to make the reader incorporate and feel an emotional mood towards the poem. In a spiritual and loving tone it states that “i want, no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)” (Cummings 6-7). Each one of the poems are unique in their own way, but both have completely divergent feelings and tones to them. “Annabel Lee” has a dark, gloomy, and cold tone that makes the reader feel a sense of loneliness. Poe sets a sorrowful and mournful
In “Annabel Lee”, Edgar Allan Poe, like in many of his stories, describes the death of a beautiful woman. He describes for the reader that the love of him and Annabel Lee was so strong, that the angels in Heaven envied them and this was the cause of her death. It is disputed that the woman named Annabel Lee in this poem, is in real life, Edgar Allen Poe’s wife, Virginia. “Annabel Lee” is a perfect example of how Edgar Allen Poe used romance to illustrate the essence of death. He describes how the love that he had for her was so strong and it ended up causing envy in the angels and they in return took her away from him. The poem illustrates the misery that can be
Furthermore, Poe shows that he longs for the reader to be with Annabel, because she was adored and loved by all. This diction gives the poem a romantic feel, which is outside of its gloomy morbid tone, showing his true love for his deceased. This shows that Poe wants the reader to feel a different side of the poem, most of the tone of the poem is dark and extremely morbid, but by saying this he adds a bit of relief to the readers, showing them that it’s not all bad. The most dramatic illustration of this poem is when Poe uses the lines in the poem that suggest imagery such as “For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Annabel Lee” “and the starts never rise, but I feel the bright eyes” This imagery shows the reader what Annabel Lee was like, it glamorizes her showing the reader that she was an incredibly amazing and beautiful person. The diction in Annabel Lee cannot be any more applauding; by doing this he sets the tone for the whole poem, which makes the poem so wonderful in the first place.
Poe is one of the early American poets of Romantic literature. In the poem Annabel Lee he uses idealism in Romance language to describe a relationship with a woman in first person. A description of the adult lovers as children most likely represent innocence or naïvety. The Romanticism comes in by comparing the couple to elements of nature. The love that the two share is free from societal norms or influence. The joy of just being together and sharing themselves with one another is so great that even angels were envious of them.
As a master of short stories of horror, Edgar Allan Poe is knowledgeable, learned and imaginative. He could skillfully manipulate the words in his literary works to create everything people can think of. The masterful use of the symbols, objects intensify the readers’ nerve as the typical elements of horror in Poe’s short stories, and therefore it is also a feature which makes Poe 's stories different from other writers.
Poe’s use of intense imagery conveys a heartfelt hunger for his main character. There is also equal desolation from her death. After the death of “Annabel” the narrator has a strong opinion that it wasn’t a natural death. He is clearly distraught when he exclaims, “A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling My beautiful Annabel Lee” (Poe 609). Her death could necessarily have been from a virus or pneumonia however, the narrator blames the angels for her demise. Poe uses visual imagery to divert the audience’s attention away from the fact that her death could have been from natural causes. He wants us to feel the pain and shock of losing a loved one. “This pivotal line describes the death of Annabel
Another technique Poe uses in his poem to convey his feelings is repetition. The narrator repeating himself really shows his strong love for Annabel. Although he does state how much he loves her in the text, the repeated words shows a deeper emotion of his passionate attachment. According to Jeanine Johnson’s overviews Johnson says that line 9 in the poem Poe repeats the word "love" three times, as if to demonstrate the inadequacy of that human word for a condition that is divine