Love is Frozen... Wider Reading 17: Annabel Lee

Composed in May 1849, Edgar Allen Poe's last complete work was not published until shortly after his death that same year. Poe himself made sure the poem would be seen in print. He gave a copy to Rufus Wilmot Griswold, his personal rival, another to John Thompson to repay a $5 debt, and sold a copy to Sartain's Union Magazine for publication. It is unclear to whom the eponymous Annabel Lee is referring. Biographers and critics often suggest Poe's frequent use of the theme of death, particularly of beautiful women, stems from the repeated loss of women throughout his own life, including his mother Eliza Poe and his foster mother Frances Allan. Biographers often interpret that "Annabel Lee" was written for Poe's wife Virginia, who had died two years prior. "Annabel Lee" and Poe’s other works were an inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov in his novel Lolita (1955), in which the narrator, as a child, falls in love with the terminally ill Annabel Leigh "in a princedom by the sea". Originally, Nabokov titled the novel The Kingdom by the Sea.

The speaker laments the death of his childhood sweetheart, Annabel Lee, reminiscing about their time together and defies even angels and demons to tear his love apart. Poe often associated death with the freezing and capturing of beauty, and “Annabel Lee” is no exception. Just as words can suspend and encapsulate a single moment, so can this poem capture the idyllic childhood romance of the speaker and Annabel. The poem specifically mentions the youth of the unnamed narrator and of Annabel Lee, and it celebrates child-like emotions in a way consistent with the ideals of the Romantic era. Many Romantics from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries viewed adulthood as a corruption of the purer instincts of childhood, and they preferred nature to society because they considered it to be a better and more instinctive state.

The name "Annabel Lee" continues the pattern of a number of Poe's names for his dead women, which contain the lulling but melancholy "L" sound. Furthermore, "Annabel Lee" has a peaceful, musical rhythm and makes heavy use of the refrain phrases "in this kingdom by the sea" and "of the beautiful Annabel Lee.” In particular, although the poem's stanzas have a somewhat irregular length and structure, the poet continually emphasizes the three words "me," "Lee," and "sea," enforcing the linked nature of these concepts within the poem.

Annabel Lee - Quotations