Annabel Lee (Criticism)

Criticism

What Do I Read Next?

• The poems by Poe that are most often associated with this one are “Lenore” and “To Helen,” which are also about the deaths of young women. All of his works can be found in the Library of America’s superior collection Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, published in 1984.
• Poe is considered the first serious literary critic in America. His ideas about art are evident in his nonfiction prose, collected in a different Library of America volume entitled Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews: Theory of Poetry, Reviews of British and Continental Authors, Reviews of American Authors and American Literature.
• Tundra Books has a hardcover book-length edition of this poem, released in 1987. Annabel Lee has text by Edgar Allan Poe and watercolors by award-winning children’s book artist Gilles Tibo. It is usually cataloged with children’s books.
• One of the best biographies of Poe available is Kenneth Silverman’s Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance, published in 1992 by Harper Perennial. This book is not only richly detailed, but it tells an engrossing tale of the poet’s life.
• John Evangelist Walsh concentrates on the four days leading up to Poe’s death (which was two days before “Annabel Lee” was published) in his brief 1998 book Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s whereabouts for those days and the exact circumstances of his death have always been matters of controversy, and Walsh is meticulous in gathering evidence about what might have really happened.
• Daniel Hoffman’s 1998 analysis of the poet, entitled Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, has been received with some controversy: readers generally respect his intellectual approach but find fault with the conclusions he draws about Poe’s work.
• Poe is considered to be a primary influence on the French Symbolist school, that came a generation after him. Charles Baudelaire, in particular, did much to save Poe from obscurity with his translations and reviews. The most notable collection of French Symbolist poetry is Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal (Flowers of Evil), which is available with commentary from Cambridge University Press series Landmarks in World Literature.

speaker’s — seems more metaphorical than literal: Poe uses the word “child” to emphasize the innocence and purity of their bond. Because of his beloved’s youth and their untainted love for each other, he is a child in spirit, if not in chronological age.

Given the importance of figurative meaning, we cannot depend solely upon literal interpretations of poetry, nor read them as simple statements of autobiographical fact. Thus perhaps we need not choose from among the several candidates for a specific source of inspiration for “Annabel Lee,” or even enter this debate at all. Poe indirectly offers some insight into his purpose for the poem in the essay “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846). In it, Poe dissects his earlier work “The Raven” (1845), reconstructing the deliberate process by which he chose the style, form, tone, and subject of his most famous poem. It is not clear whether Poe intends for us to take seriously every detail of his sometimes outrageous “philosophy.” Nevertheless, he is sincere on at least one point: that “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world — and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover” (Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays).

Poe developed this theory of the “most poetic topic in the world” several years before he composed “Annabel Lee,” which suggests that the general theme was a greater influence on its composition than was a particular person. He used the death of a beautiful woman as his topic not only in “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven” but in many of his other poems, most notably “Lenore” (1831) and “Ulalume” (1847). Poe also visited this grim subject several times in his fiction, and the narrator mourns the loss of his fair beloved in the tales “Ligeia” (1838) and “Eleonora” (1841).

Not only is the theme of “Annabel Lee” one that is common to multiple works by Poe, but several of its phrases echo earlier compositions. For instance, many critics have noted the similarities between “Annabel Lee” and Poe’s first published poem, “Tamerlane” (1827). In “Tamerlane” the love of which the poet speaks “was such as angel minds above might envy,” while in “Annabel Lee” “The angels, not half so happy in Heaven, / Went envying her and me.” “Thus,” comments Poe’s biographer, Arthur Hobson Quinn, “in his first and in his last poem he thought in terms of a spiritual passion that transcended human limits” (Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography ). This is an idealized view of love which Poe held throughout his life, from the time before he met Virginia to the time after her death. And it is largely his interest in examining a “spiritual passion that transcended human limits” which inspired Poe to write this poem.

Though Poe argues in “The Philosophy of Composition” that the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetic topic, he makes a slightly different claim in the article “The Poetic Principle.” The essay is based on the text of a lecture frequently presented by Poe during 1848 and 1849, and it overlaps with “Annabel Lee” both in the time period in which it was written and in subject matter. In “The Poetic Principle,” Poe declares that though beauty is the goal of poetry, its proper topic is love: “Love love — the true, the divine Eros — the Uranian, as distinguished from the Dionaean Venus — is unquestionably the purest and truest of all poetic themes” (Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays ). “Uranian Venus” refers to love that is spiritual, pure, and eternal. It is a rare love that transcends the physical world, as opposed to a “Dionaean,” or earthly, common, and finite, type of love.

In “Annabel Lee,” the poet celebrates this true Uranian love: “we loved with a love that was more than love.” Poe repeats the word “love” three times, as if to demonstrate the inadequacy of that human word for a condition that is divine. Even though Annabel and her lover were young, the speaker contends that their feelings surpassed those of all others: “our love it was stronger by far than the love / Of those who were older than we — / Of many far wiser than we.” The poet argues that wisdom and age do not determine one’s power to love deeply and honestly, and he then goes on to proclaim that “neither the angels in Heaven above / Nor the demons down under the sea / Can ever dissever my soul from the soul / Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.”

Even though the speaker claims to possess an everlasting love that transcends all physical boundaries, he feels compelled to visit Annabel’s grave again and again. The poet tells us that not only does he visit the gravesite, but he enters her tomb in order to lie down next to her corpse. What is more, it is clear from the present verb tense that this is a repeated action: “all the night-tide, I lie down by the side / Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride / In her sepulchre there by the sea — / In her tomb by the side of the sea.” The poem ends by emphasizing the material location of their union: the final two lines are nearly identical as they point us to the “sepulchre” or “tomb” in which the lovers lie. Given these circumstances, J. Gerald Kennedy asks, “why does he try to achieve physical proximity to the corpse if his love is indeed spiritual and lasting? His action seems an unconscious betrayal of anxiety, a reflexive acknowledgment of the very separation which the poem itself seeks to deny” (Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing ). In other words, the poet has boasted of the strength and significance of his spiritual bond with Annabel Lee. Yet, in his need to be near the body of his beloved, he seems to contradict his own assertions and indicate that a physical connection is just as important as a non-physical one.

We may better understand this apparent contradiction if we recall that the poet’s tale is poignant because he loses not only love but beauty. Poe revised the poem a few times, making some minor alterations which nevertheless affect the overall meaning of the poem. In an earlier version of the poem, Poe writes in the third stanza, “A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling / My beautiful Annabel Lee.” In the final version of the poem, Poe changes the lines to read: “A wind blew out of a cloud by night / Chilling my Annabel Lee.” With the revision, Poe infuses the event with the mysterious and potentially sinister characteristics of night-time. Furthermore, the addition of two syllables (“by night”) to the third line requires Poe to shift “Chilling” to the fourth line, and it allows him to delay using the word “beautiful” to describe Annabel. He does not include this word until the fifth stanza, at which point we know that she has died. This is significant because one of Poe’s main projects in this poem is to explore the link between beauty and death.

Through the first two-and-a-half stanzas, the speaker never explicitly reveals that his beloved has died. In the first four lines of the third stanza, he refers to a time at which Annabel was still alive: when she experienced a fatal chill. The action of death is so abrupt that the poet appears not to have the time to name it: “A wind blew out of a cloud by night / Chilling my Annabel Lee; / So that her high-born kinsmen came / And bore her away from me, / To shut her up in a sepulchre / In this kingdom by the sea.” One moment Annabel Lee is hypothermic, and the next moment she is being buried by her relatives. Only a semi-colon signals the change from life to death, and the sentence recreates the swift and sorrowful transformation that occurs in the lovers’ history.

In the fourth stanza, the poet is able to slow his recollections somewhat, and there he speaks directly of that moment which is so painful to him: “the wind came out of the cloud, chilling / And killing my Annabel Lee.” The poet has explicitly acknowledged her death, and in the final stanzas he can now refer to her beauty. Between the fifth and sixth stanzas, the speaker repeats the phrase “Of the beautiful Annabel Lee” three times. The poem is full of repetition — this is a favorite technique of Poe’s — but this triple refrain is unique because it occurs in such rapid succession, and the poet thus calls attention to this line.

Why does the poet want to underscore at this point in the piece that Annabel Lee was beautiful? Surely we are led to believe that she was attractive in life, but there is a particular kind of beauty that comes with her death. In the fifth and sixth stanzas the poem shifts from narrative to memorial. That is to say, in the first part of the poem, the speaker has told the story of his relationship with his beloved and of her death. In the latter part, he tells us what his life is like now and the way that he tries to honor her memory. As the poem turns from story to commemoration, the vocabulary also changes. There is in the sixth stanza a notable emphasis on visual imagery that is not present in the rest of the poem. For instance, the poet mentions the moon and the stars in which he observes “the bright eyes” of his dear Annabel. His love becomes not just something to feel or imagine but to touch and to see. In fact, the beauty that he conjures comes to replace the “love” about which the poet has spoken earlier in the poem: he uses “love” eight times in the first five stanzas, but this word disappears in the sixth. The theoretical idea of “love” gives way to a more concrete notion of loveliness, and the absence of the former term in this last stanza suggests that, though we may want to value the ethereal qualities of true love, its tangible elements are what we ultimately cherish most.

Source: Jeannine Johnson, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2000.

David Kelly

David Kelly is an instructor of literature and writing at several community colleges in Illinois, as well as a fiction writer and playwright. In this essay, Kelly examines whether the verbal excesses of “Annabel Lee” are justified, or if the poem is just an exercise in cleverness for its own sake.

A sure sign of weak poetry — and if Edgar Allan Poe had any weakness as a writer, it was his poetry — is that it is padded with extra words that serve no purpose but to fill out its metrical scheme. The word “extra” is key here. We all think that we can recognize which words can be considered useless to a poem, but that concept is open and is constantly interpreted in different ways. The interpretation of what is necessary and what can be dismissed as filler seems to be at the root of the controversy about whether Poe was a good poet or a bad one. A poem like “Annabel Lee” provides the author with a good forum for clever word trickery. Some people praise such cleverness, while others immediately become suspicions of a poet who might be more enamoured with the sounds of words than with what ideas they represent — in other words, there is a good chance, if his poems are too musical, that Poe may be willing to settle for weakness in his poem’s thoughts if he feels audiences are kept amused enough with the excellence of his music.

Poe’s supporters, who have grown in number through the generations, encourage readers to be skeptical, but to keep open, unprejudiced minds about the fact that such suspicious could turn out to be unfounded. Serious content is possible even when the style is as conspicuous as it is in “Annabel Lee.” Just because it is is possible, though, is no evidence of whether he has achieved it or not, just as the music of the poem is no true sign that it is only light verse, popular but lacking content.

Some of the brightest lights in the English-speaking literary establishment, including Henry James and T. S. Eliot, dismissed Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry as juvenile, as the kind of stuff that could only appeal to underdeveloped tastes. It is certainly easier for a person in their teens to appreciate Poe than to even follow what is said by James or Eliot, but we have to be careful to not identify universality as a weakness, or obtuseness as a strength. The charge against Poe has to be examined, though, if only because there have been many weak poets who write like Poe. Our first piece of evidence would be the strong, unavoidable rhythm of his poems, evident in “Annabel Lee”: it is exactly the sort of thing that a poetaster with nothing to say would use to simulate profundity.

It does not help Poe’s case to note that the speaker of the poem actually is juvenile in his attitude. This is not to say that it is immature to grieve, but there has to be a question, when one holds onto grief for “many and many a year,” of whether the emotion really is not fading or whether the person finds that he likes striking the pose of a griever. Grief is not forgotten, but there is more to it than latching onto the first flush of emotion and staying frozen in that state for years. An immature point of view only knows the initial feeling, having, of course, never matured beyond it. It is small wonder that young people are able to relate so well to this poem, given that its speaker looks at life from a young person’s perspective.

To counter the charge of juvenility, one only needs to focus on the fact that emotions are the business of poetry, and that if learning to get past them were the standard for maturity then all poems would just have to be juvenile. That the speaker of “Annabel Lee” cannot grow out of his grief, which some people might consider an embarrassing personality weakness, can actually be a source of pride in the experience-obsessed world of a Poe poem. To him, “maturity” in the sense of being able to put a lost love out of one’s mind would be a wasteful, soul-deadening thing. The “highbrow kinsmen,” the angels and demons, and those who are older and wiser all expressed their objections to the young lovers’ affair, and the maturity that they represented proved useless in stopping passion. Readers get the sense that it is their opposition that, at least in part, has given the speaker the tenacity to hold on to his memories. Youth rises to its best when it has to oppose the challenge to grow up, act mature, and to keep its unruly emotions in check. One gets the feeling that Poe would accept the accusation that his mournful poetry was juvenile, that his only objection would be in calling this label an accusation.

There is long and ongoing aesthetic argument to be made about whether an artist can be considered successful simply because she or he is able to provoke the response they intended. This question frequently is raised in modern art, with artists who use offensive materials or abuse cherished symbols to create works that are meant to shock: if audiences are in fact shocked, does that necessarily make the work art? What if a work is agreeable, and that is all that it aspired to be: are we to consider Liberace an artist in the medium of schmaltz?

It seems that, at least in certain cases, the objection to juvenile writing should be lifted from works that intend to be accessible to a wide age range. Accepting Poe’s juvenile subject matter as artistry because he intended it to be juvenile would mean that some of his detractors would have to, however grudgingly, keep their objections to themselves, providing he had a good reason for intending to write that way. One good case to be made in favor of juvenilia is that it is so familiar to everyone, being a part of the human experience. Not everyone lost someone close to them in youth, but almost everyone who has gone through adolescence knows what it is like to suffer and feel that the world does not understand suffering of such depth. Even the most mature reader — even James or Eliot — must be able to find within themselves some echo of this poem’s emotional overkill.

The style with which Poe presents his ideas really ought to be juvenile, in order to give the idea of unstoppable love and inconsolable grief their right presentation. This is the time to consider whether or not the extra words, which seem added for purely cosmetic reasons, might actually prove their worth. Throughout the poem, there are plenty of cases where Poe uses more words than should be needed if he were only trying to make his point cerebrally. The most glaring example of verbal excess seems to be the constant reiteration that all of this happened in “a kingdom by the sea.” Mentioned once or even twice, and this phrase gives the poem a fairy-tale aura. When the sea is repeated seven times, though, and always at the ends of lines, readers cannot help feeling that the author was dragging around a handy little chock of a phrase that he could rhyme with “Annabel Lee” whenever he felt the need. The same suspicion of padding holds for the second “many” in line one, all of line ten, and the inclusion of both “chilling” and “killing” — they could be left out without any loss to the meaning of the poem, and exist only to serve a rather gaudy form.

But poetry isn’t only about meaning — the aspect of sounds is involved as well. If it didn’t care about the work’s musicality, a poem might as well be a work of prose. The objection that is raised to “Annabel Lee,” as well as to Poe’s other poems, is that sound has not only been acknowledged but has been given the main role. Most students of literature agree that the intellectual aspect should dominate, that the sound does its work well when it supplements the meaning, not when it rules it.

In poetry that aims to stand up straight and look squarely at life’s mysteries, Poe’s method of melodiousness at the expense of quiet thoughtfulness would be inexcusable. This poem is told through the speaker’s eyes, though, and it is therefore not free to address reality straight-on: it is filtered through his mind and his vocabulary. It is the character of the young man who lost his lover that is talking to us in this sing-song way, and is adding phrases to make the song come out right. This rhythm and repetition may not describe grief at its rawest, but they do describe grief as this character sees it. In the end, it turns out to be unfair to accuse Poe of weakness if his verse sounds like the work of someone who is immaturely obsessed. The voice seems right to the mind of the character, and, juvenile or not, the character deserves to be examined. Whether Poe wrote this way because of his own limitations is a debate for biographers, but it is not the issue here. However he came up with it, “Annabel Lee” provides an excellent, whole psychological snapshot of a particular personality.

Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2000.

“In other words, the poet has boasted of the strength and significance of his spiritual bond with Annabel Lee. Yet, in his need to be near the body of his beloved, he seems to contradict his own assertions and indicate that a physical connection is just as important as a non-physical one.”