"Annabel Lee"--Lee-ves You Chilled

                The facts are these: there are thousands of people in this world who understand more about Edgar Allan Poe than I ever will or hope to. But that isn’t to say I don’t appreciate and—furthermore—enjoy his works. With that in mind, I present to you my review of “Annabel Lee”.

                The poem is the closest Poe could ever get to a Sparks love story, and many speculate whether or not he wrote it about his dead cousin/child-wife whom died two years after their wedding (when she was the ripe old age of fifteen).

That is one damn sexy teenager.

                It is a story of a beautiful woman who is loved by the narrator so strongly that even angels are jealous. She is stolen from him and placed in a sepulcher by the sea. The poem winds down with the narrator longing for his love and eventually joining her in death; he is buried beside her.

                I don’t need to say Poe is the king of all that is creepy and Gothic (the prince is Tim Burton). In this poem the woman is literally placed in a tomb, an enormous motif of the genre; women encased and trapped, the claustrophobic element. She is beautiful and she dies because angels are jealous of her love, which is our sexual repression ingredient. Furthermore, Poe sets the scene by using adjectives to impress cold isolation—“a wind blew out of a cloud, chilling,”—and everyone knows location is half the battle in giving somebody the creeps.

                It ends with the narrator grieving himself to death to be with his love in the ground. So it’s basically a fantastic rom-com (like Schindler's List!). This poem is recommended.

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