Edgar Allan Poe "Annabel Lee"

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Annabel Lee appears at first to contradict every other writing of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was thought of as a demented, dark, cold man because of his writings during his time. Poe's most famous works, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Raven, and The Tell-Tale Heart, are excellent examples of his typically dark and depressing style. Yet when you begin Annabel Lee, you see joy and happiness in Poe's tone.

However, as the poem continues, you see the dark, mental aspect attached to his work. The thoughts of the moon shining every night to remind him of that which he had lost, of the stars never rising without her memory, and of the pitiful way he spends his nights by "her tomb by the sounding sea" show how Poe exemplifies darkness even through something so beautiful as love.

The poem, Annabel Lee, starts with Poe looking back on the life of him and his bride as if it were a fairy tale.

When he writes of a " kingdom by the sea", I believe that he's saying that the life that they had together was perfect, happy and peaceful. He also says that Annabel Lee "lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me." I think that Poe was saying that she lived for him and that he lived through her. They loved each other so much that they couldn't begin to believe that they couldn't imagine live without the other. This idea is backed up by the life that Poe lived after his wife died. He drank heavily, and although he was around many women, whenever the opportunity arrived that he could've married one of them he always consciously hurt the woman to whom he was engaged.

In the second stanza Poe hints...