Nicole Hughes
Damico
Honors English 9
10 December 2014 Undying Love for the Undead: An Analysis of “Annabel Lee” A rotten decomposing corpse resides in a tomb, no longer in the in the land of the living. A cold lifeless crypt teeming with the ceaseless love of a man. People have been known to go to great measures to be with the ones they love. Such as a mother who runs into traffic to save her newborn child, a dog rescuing his owner from a blazing building, or a soldier taking a bullet for his country. In today’s society, rarely anyone will be brave enough or diligent enough to show the love and commitment that the narrator of the poem expresses in the poem “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe. The poem creates an eerie, sinister feeling of obsession but also a magical, enchanting feeling of love. Particullary, Poe uses repetition, imagery, and mood to illustrate a man’s undying love for a woman he loss. Poe uses repetition in many ways throughout the poem to reiterate that. In the lines; “Then to love and be loved” (6), “But we loved with a love that was more than love--” (9), and “With a love that the wings seraphs of heaven” (11) he repeats forms of the word love to portray the narrator’s and his beloved’s passionate love they once shared. In every stanza Poe repeats “kingdom by the sea”(2,8, 14, 20, 31). He does this to emphasize the memories and time he and his love spent there together. The most repeated phrase throughout the poem is “Annabel Lee”(4, 10, 16,