ANNABELL LEE

Elgar Allan Poe – the American Romantic

movement
SETTING - Time: 1849
- Place: Kingdom by the sea – bleak, unforgiving place,
where the clouds blow chilly
- Atmosphere: blissful, making the poem sound like a
fairy tale
- There’s no neat, happy ending – the poem leaves the
speaker in grief, with no possibility of escape
*Blissful: extremely happy
Who is assumed speaker? - The poem is narrated by AL’s lover, who forcefully
rails against the people - and supernatural beings
 It’s Edgar Allen Poe.
*Rail: complain angrily (verb)
Author - Was written by Edgar Allan Poe
- Be the last poem that he wrote before his death.
- Looks like the death of a young woman and the love
that the narrator felt for her
- The poem details the love that the narrator felt when
he met AL and the love that he still carried for her.
-
The Format - “AL” Consist of 6 stanzas, 3 with 6 lines, 1 with 7,
and 2 with 8, with the rhyme pattern differing slightly
in each one
- The poem uses repetition of words and phrases
purposely to create its mournful effect. -> Parallelism
-

The reason for the death of - According to the narrator, it was precisely because
AL the angles were jealous of him and AL’s love that
they sent a cold wind one night.
-
What does “coveted’ mean, - Covet = desire
and who portrayed this action?  To covet sth is to desire it strongly
- The angles portrayed this action
*portray (verb):
 What is a synonym to the
word “angle”?
Highborn kinsmen means?
Sepulchre means?
The sound device is “chilling
and killing”
The speaker states that him
and AL’s love is stranger than
what 2 groups of people?
Write the number of the two
lines that support this
statement.
“ for the moon never beams
without bringing me dreams”
- Winged seraphs = angle
- it could be a reference to the angels: "highborn"
because they come from heaven, and "kinsmen"
because Annabel Lee is herself angelic.
- Tomb
- Personification: is give to human characteristics to
inanimate objects
Ex: “the wind came out of the cloud by night.
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee”
 As if the wind is a human and capable of killing
another person.
- “ But our love it was stronger by far than the love of
those who were older than we
Of many far wiser than we”
- Internal rhyme

- The angles located

In the heaven
Demons below the sea

- Where the speaker spend most of his time after the

death of AL?
-
Lines 1-4
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
-The poem begins in a way that is deliberately
close to the typical beginning of a fairy tale –
an allusion to the genre, in a way. The first line
is like an echo of “once upon a time” and the
second line brings to mind the figure of a lone
maiden locked up in a faraway kingdom –
another classic feature of fairy tales. This
beginning lets the reader know that what
follows is an idealized account and involves a
degree of fantasy.
- But the opening lines also lure the reader into s
 false sense of security-they put a sweet, simple
face on what will later turn out to be a
psychologically troubling poem.
-That is, the fairy tale beginning dets up the
expectation of a fairy tale ending that fails to
arrive-there is no “happily ever after” here, and
the contrast between this opening and the lines
to come highlights the sense of ongoing grief
that color the entire poem.
Questions:
1. Which of the following is Not one of the possible causes of Poe’s death?
 Voter fraud scheme
2. Why did Poe leave the university he entered in 1826?
 He ran up many
3. What was the name of his wife?
 Virginia Clemm
4. Readers of this poem are most likely to associated with?
 A fairy tale
5. Which of the following statements best describes the poem’s narrator?
 Mentally unbalanced by the death of his loves one.
6. Which statement would the narrator most likely agree with?
 We each have only one special love