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

Love is Patriotic... Wider Reading 16: Henry V

It is a commonly held belief that Shakespeare's Henry V was the first to be performed at the new Globe Theatre in the spring of 1599. Since then, the story of the victor of Agincourt has been performed and adapted many times, with the dashing king as a prominent historical figure. Many types of love are explored within the play, the most obvious of which is patriotism and love of one's country. When Henry calls for his army to "Follow [their] spirit, and upon this charge / Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!" they are portraying their strength in terms of their love for England and its king. During the play Henry also experiences the loss of many of his friends and family members, who he remembers gratefully as loving him as a man despite his high status.

Henry's wooing of Katherine - or as he calls her, Kate - at first superficially appears to be the charming comical awkwardness of a soldier talkinh to an aristocratic lady. But Katherine knows that "the tongues of men are full of deceits", and for all his insistences on lacking eloquence Henry's speech is lengthy and highbrow. Katherine asks, "Is it possible dat I sould love de enemie of France?". To the king, and probably most others, the match with Katherine is a marriage of national conquest, not of human love. Henry is obliged to answer that he is not the enemy of France - quite the opposite. That this marriage is about rapacity for land rather than love is clear from Henry's rhapsodizing about France itself. At best, after some banter about the language barrier, "I love thee cruelly", he protests, letting slip a Janus-faced adjective. He believes calling her "a good soldier-breeder" is an appeal to maternal instincts.

After substantially more dissertation from Henry, Katherine punctures the hypocrisy of all this - the pretense that any fate is in her hands - by noting that the match is entirely up to her father. Although the Princess and Alice insist it is not French custom for ladies to kiss before marriage, Henry kisses her. The French nobles return, and Burgundy explains Katherine's resistence as maidens' natural modesty regarding Cupid. Henry declares, "Yet they do wink and yield, as love is blind and enforces". Historically, Henry married Catherine de Valois on 2 June 1420. Here, it may not be so much a marriage as a rape dressed up in ceremony. With the French conceding all, the "conquest" is achieved and all look forward, incorrectly as the audience knows, to a lasting peace.

Henry v - Quotations