Poes Lost Love, Poetry Paper

When first reading “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe, there’s a sense of love that you can feel realistically and immediately. Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most famous poets of the 19th century. Poe is considered to be the father of modern detective stories and highly admired. The dark gruesome images that Poe depicts are what make readers love his work. He paints a clear picture and uses that setting to his advantage in each of his dark tales. In “Annabel Lee” he writes a happy yet dark poem using the elements of imagery, symbolism and tone to show his permanence of true love.

Edgar Allan Poe is the most famous poet in his genre of dark, gruesome mystery. “Poe had a difficult upbringing, fraught with illness, loss and poverty. ” (Giammarco online 01/2013). Poe’s parents both died when he was the age of two, which left him orphaned. Poe was also poverty-stricken most of his life and could not even finish college due to the lack of funds. After college, “he briefly attended West Point Military Academy and served briefly in the U. S. Army. ” (Delbanco, Cheuse 291) Poe then married his thirteen-year-old cousin who contracted tuberculosis, which took the life of his mother and father as well.

These events probably triggered his dark sense of writing influencing his famous poems such as “The Raven”, “Tell-Tale Heart”, “Annabel Lee” and many more. Poe was very talented, not by just writing poems and stories, but he worked for many newspapers and magazines as well. Poe passed away at the young age of 40, with his death a mystery. (Delbanco, Cheuse 291) The poem “Annabel Lee” is about a beautiful, painful memory. A childhood love was abruptly brought to an end when Annabel Lee passes away. Poe wants you to know in this story that it is great love, not just a childhood fling. “But we loved with a love that was more than love” (9).

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This love is so great that even the angels are jealous of this, which is why he believes they took his love away. His love is so strong for this girl that he lays down every night by the dead body in the tomb. “I lie down by the side / Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride” (38-39). This is the poem that turns when his true love dies and steps into his point of view in his dark world. “Annabel Lee” is a six-line, six stanza ballad. A ballad is a type of poem that is intended to be recited or sung. A ballad poem “tells a lively or tragic story in simple sample” (Delbanco, Cheuse 796).

In the poem “Annabel Lee”, Poe makes his story feel very realistic, almost as if you were the one who lost your love. In each set of stanzas, Poe sets up a pattern of rhymes. Also, he sets a pattern of a long line followed by a short line and so on. But in a few spots, he switches it up. Poe was very talented when it came to the setting. The first tactic that he uses in “Annabel Lee” was imagery. Imagery is the things that are seen or imagined. Imagery is a visually or figurative language used to create lyrical emotion. In “Annabel Lee” Poe refers to a kingdom by the sea over and over again.

This helps creates a picture of a time and place a long time ago and makes his love seem more mysterious. He also uses imagery when describing “That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling / And killing my Annabel Lee” (25-26) putting a vast picture in our head that is merely a sickness taking over her body. The second strategy that Edger Allan Poe uses is symbolism. Symbolism is the practice of representing things by symbols, or with a symbolic meaning. Poe talks about “For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams” (34) which is a symbol for the character not being able to sleep at night without dreaming of his love.

In this poem, Poe also talks about a highborn kinsman. This is a symbol for everyone who doesn’t understand his love for this girl and just thinks that they were young. Poe was a very talented man. Although he never was a rich famous man while he lived, his dark gruesome tales are known by everybody today. His skills of using symbolism and imagery in “Annabel Lee” have made it one of his more well-known poems. Many people believe that his inspiration for this poem was the death of his wife. “Annabel Lee” is a great love poem that came out of the dark mind of Poe and will always remain a classic.

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