Edgar Allan Poe Annotation

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"Imitation" by Edgar Allan Poe was written in 1847. It is a lyrical poem and has 20 lines, each two lines rhyming with each other. A lyrical poem is a poem where the speaker speaks about their own thoughts or feelings. The poem is not split into stanzas, and instead is continuing lines. This poem has many different interpretations and can be taken in several ways. In my opinion, this poem seems like the speaker reminiscing on his childhood and seeing the positive and negative aspects of it. The first two lines start the poem with "A dark unfathom'd tide of interminable pride","unfathom'd" being a shorted version of unfathomed. Unfathomed has two meanings, one being "unknown", and the other being "water of undetermined depth". This line likely uses both meanings. "Interminable" means endless. Together, these two lines speak about an endless tide that's size cannot be determined and is made of pride, showing the large amount of pride. The next line elaborates, comparing the speaker's early life to a dream, and connecting to the previous line, showing that the tide of pride existed during the …show more content…

He says "spirit" because he saw those things with his eyes, but hasn’t truly seen them because he was trying to block everything out, and he didn’t want to see those things. The speaker let those things pass them by with those eyes that saw everything but blocked it out so he could stay in that dreamlike state. He continues to say, "Let none of earth inherit that vision on my spirit", which is speaking about how the "vision" on his "spirit" was blurred so that he couldn't see things, and that nobody on Earth should "inherit" that blurred vision, and that nobody should blur things out like