Annabel Lee

(Lady in a Yellow Dress Watering Roses,
Maryland, 1830, by Elizabeth Glaser,
American watercolorist)

For most of us, our first experience of falling in love often, sadly, comes to an end, yet it also continues to live on forever.

Sometimes an emotion can be so profound that it is better suited to expression in poetry. Described in prose, the feelings would seem merely melodramatic, even kitsch. But stated in the language of poetry, with its repetition, its form in meter and rhyme, inverted syntax, and unexpected images, the poet’s ardor becomes calmer and thus easier for the reader to understand and to appreciate, as in this well-known ballad.

ANNABEL LEE

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.

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 winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

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 high-born kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulcher
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.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we —
Of many far wiser than we —
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

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 the sepulcher there by the sea,
In her tomb by the side of the sea.

~ Edgar Allan Poe (1801-1849), American poet, writer, and father of the detective story

The Bells

(Winter Scene with Horse and Sleigh, 1855 by Cornelius
Krieghoff, 1815-1872, Dutch-born Canadian landscape painter)

This verse is like many of Edgar Allan Poe’s other poems, pleasing to the ear, even musical, because of his use of figures of speech like onomatopoeia (words imitating sounds) and alliteration (the repeating of consonant sounds), and the many repetitions of certain words.

from THE BELLS

Hear the sledges with the bells —
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells —
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

~ Edgar Allan Poe (1801-1849), American poet, writer, and father of the detective story

To One Lost in Paradise

(Portrait of an Unknown Woman by an early
nineteenth-century French artist)

Grief can whisper, but often it wails.

It’s a delicate line that separates the emotional from the overwrought. The poet, searching for ways to draw an image of his beloved, has to take care not to go to extremes. Edgar Allan Poe almost crosses the boundaries in this love poem. The metaphors he uses at first glance seem confusing and in a whirl. But then, it becomes clear he has entered the fanciful world between the real and the unreal, between trance and dream, between the Past and the Future. The metaphors reflect the maelstrom that has descended on him.

TO ONE LOST IN PARADISE

Thou wast that all to me, love,
For which my soul did pine ─
A green isle in the sea, love,
A fountain and a shrine,
All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,
And all the flowers were mine.

Ah, dream too bright to last!
Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise
But to be overcast!
A voice from out the Future cries,
“On! On!” ─ but o’er the Past
(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies
Mute, motionless, aghast!

For, alas! alas! with me
The light of Life is o’er!
“No more ─ no more ─ no more ─”
(Such language holds the solemn sea
To the sands upon the shore)
Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree,
Or the stricken eagle soar!

And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy dark eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams ─
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.

~ Edgar Allan Poe (1801-1849), American poet, writer and father of the detective story