The Spellbinding Appeal of "Annabel Lee"

It is, perhaps, the second most famous poem in the world (behind Poe's own "The Raven").  In an age without a large supply of bards or scops, it is widely memorized, maybe more than any other relatively long poem in English.  It has inspired musical adaptations by Stevie Nicks and, yes, Willie Nelson.  It even crops up in the classic Hollywood thriller Play Misty for Me. 

What is it about Poe's "Annabel Lee" that has so captivated generations of readers (and singers and Clint Eastwood)?

When we speak about literature, we can consider both the subject matter, or the content, and the way the work is constructed, or the form.  On both counts, "Annabel Lee" has extraordinary appeal, rooted in basic human desires and instincts.  In fact, it's not too much to say that Poe identified exactly what buttons to push to activate our emotions and then set out to press them deliberately, setting off a cascade of delight mixed with sadness strangely sweet.

Let's begin with the subject matter, which centers on two experiences common to just about everyone: love and loss.  Poe introduces the subject of love in the memorable first stanza:

It was many and many a year ago,     In a kingdom by the sea,  That a maiden there lived whom you may know     By the name of Annabel Lee;  And this maiden she lived with no other thought     Than to love and be loved by me.

This is, to quote Sade, "no ordinary love."  Poe's persona tells us that Annabel Lee "lived with no other thought" than to be in love with him.  This is love as it ought be, as anyone who has ever been in love knows.  She is not troubled by extraneous thoughts of childcare, the high cost of eggs, the new strange sound coming from the dryer, or the dwindling number of her Instagram followers after that insult she lobbed at Hop-Frog.  No, it's all about love — and specifically love for him, the speaker.  There's a certain amount of wish fulfillment here.  The speaker of the poem is imagining the satisfying state of being the absolute center of another person's universe.  Such a situation has an appeal all its own.

The next stanza continues in this vein, but with two added dimensions:

I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea, But we loved with a love that was more than love— I and my Annabel Lee— With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven Coveted her and me.

Now we learn that both the speaker and his lover are children — a little weird, OK, but remember, this is Poe.  Actually, Poe may have been drawing on real life here.  He married his cousin Virginia while she was still a young teenager. He was in his late twenties, but he may have enjoyed imagining that they were both innocent youths deeply devoted to each other.  He called his wife "Sissy," after all, and they lived with her mother in a home that I can easily imagine he treated as a refuge from the cruel world, where he struggled with poverty and neglect.  That home may have been, on some level, his "kingdom by the sea," a remote place untouched by the real world.  (By the way, although I know of no definitive evidence, I believe Poe was thinking of Virginia when he wrote this poem.  He may have been thinking of one or more other girls and women he knew, as has been suggested elsewhere, but I think Virginia was on his mind in one way or another.  After all, she had died a couple of years before he wrote it.  He knew her better than he knew any other lover in his life, and he knew her as a child.)

The second important dimension introduced here is the envy that the "wingèd seraphs of Heaven" felt for the two lovers.  This detail further speaks to the idealized nature of their love while also setting up the tragedy recounted in the next two stanzas:

And this was the reason that, long ago, In this kingdom by the sea, A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling My beautiful Annabel Lee; So that her highborn kinsmen came And bore her away from me, To shut her up in a sepulchre In this kingdom by the sea. 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 sea) That the wind came out of the cloud by night, Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

If you have read "The Raven," "Ulalume," or a half-dozen or so other works by Poe, you probably were not surprised by what happens in these stanzas.  It can be tough for a woman to make it out of Poe's work alive.  Poe lost most of the women dearest to him — first his mother (while he was still a very young child) and later his foster mother and Virginia.  He knew loss.  He also knew the impact that death could have in a work of literature.  Indeed, in his essay "The Philosophy of Composition," he wrote, "When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world — and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”  In this essay, Poe was writing about "The Raven," but his words ring true for "Annabel Lee," as well.  Poe was enamored with beauty, more than most of us, so the loss of it — as represented by the death of a beautiful woman — was an evocative detail of a literary work, something likely to elicit a powerful emotional response, or, as he put it, "effect."

Here again Poe was tapping into a universal experience.  Just as nearly everyone has loved, nearly everyone has lost — if not a loved one, then a beloved object or even an experience, since time takes away even the most cherished events in our lives.  To live is to lose.

Subject matter goes only so far, though.  Poe dramatically increased the power of his poem by crafting various aspects of its form, including the diction, or choice of words.  With words such as "maiden," "seraphs," "kinsmen," and "sepulchre," Poe gives the poem an archaic feel, in line with the setting of a "kingdom by the sea" and a time of "many and many a year ago."  The distance of space and time provides a new kind of appeal.  While the familiar subjects of love and loss help connect us to the poem, this distance appeals to our longing for escape from what Poe called "dull realities" (in his poem "Sonnet — To Science.")  Like a modern fantasy novel or movie, the distant setting takes us out of our everyday existence while also making it easier to idealize the characters and the subject matter.  Indeed, the opening lines sound like an introduction to a fairy tale: "It was many and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea . . . ."

Less obvious but more forceful is Poe's choice of rhythm.  As a longtime critic, Poe literally read for a living.  I don't know how many poems he read over the course of his life, but I suspect the number was quite large, and all of this reading experience probably developed or sharpened his ear for poetry.  We can get a sense of his understanding of the mechanics of poetry from this line from his essay "The Philosophy of Composition," in which he focuses on the content and form of the "The Raven": "The former is trochaic — the latter is octameter acatalectic, alternating with heptameter catalectic repeated in the refrain of the fifth verse, and terminating with tetrameter catalectic."

Without following Poe into the intricacies of prosody — that is, the principles of sound patterns in poetry — I can simply say that "Annabel Lee," unlike many other poems in English, is not written in a primarily iambic meter.  In other words, the pattern does not amount to single unstressed syllables followed by single stressed syllables: ta DAH ta DAH ta DAH and so on.  Rather, much of it consists of two unstressed syllables following by single stressed syllables: ta ta DAH ta ta DAH ta ta DAH.  Listen to the difference between a line of Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on Snowy Evening," written primarily in iambic meter, and a line from "Annabel Lee."

whose WOODs these ARE i THINK i KNOW

But our LOVE it was STRONGer by FAR than the LOVE

The latter rhythm, known as anapestic, further removes the poem from the everyday, since it is more contrived than iambic rhythm, which often closely resembles natural speech.  Furthermore, anapestic rhythm forces us to wait just a little longer for the stress, building unconscious suspense and greater satisfaction.

Finally, we have to say something about the rhyme, which is insistent in "Annabel Lee."  Rhyme works because it sets up and fulfills expectations.  Once we hear an example in a poem, we unconsciously anticipate the next one and the one after that and feel satisfied when each comes at the expected time.  Poe increases this appealing combination of expectation and fulfillment by using the same sound for rhyme — that is, the long e sound — throughout the poem.  The words "sea" and "Lee" appear in every stanza, often accompanied by "me" or "we."  As a result, the poem is not only appealing, but practically hypnotic.  Numerous other end rhymes (occurring at the ends of lines) and internal rhymes (occurring within lines) provide additional appeal.  Indeed, the final stanza is so packed with end and internal rhyme that it sounds like the finale of a fireworks show:

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams     Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;  And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes     Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;  And so, 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 sounding sea.

Of course, you don't need to know any of these details to enjoy the poem.  Poe crafted his poem to work on an unconscious level.  We feel what we don't necessarily understand.  Still, analyzing "Annabel Lee" in this way is illuminating, I think.  It provides insight not only into the mechanics of poetry (of special interest to my fellow writers out there), but also into human psychology.  Poe knew enough about both to craft a poem that, although written "many and many a year ago," makes us want to return to it again, just as this lover returns to his bride even after death.