Love is something almost every human being experiences with some being more passionate than others. Love can also have a strong grip on some people giving them a positive or negative outlook on it and sometimes both. Others may find it hard to get over the person they once loved while others can just let it slide right off their backs. Edgar Allan Poe does a magnificent job in explaining the love between the speaker and his significant other in the poem “Annabel Lee”. Poe uses symbols and imagery to show how the speaker feels or to explain what is going on between the speaker and his significant other. Poe starts out his poem with a fairytale theme in which he has the speaker and his significant other as his two main focuses in the poem. …show more content…
Even though the love between the speaker and Annabel is strong there is always something trying to separate them from being together. For instance, the speaker truly wants to be with Annabel Lee her supposed ‘highborn kinsman’ (line 17) take her away from him and ‘shut her up in a sepulchre’ (line 19). The ‘highborn kinsman’ (line 17) are supposed to symbolize the interference of older people in the speaker’s life and how they do not understand the love he has for Annabel even though she is dead. Then, there is the sepulchre the sepulchre symbolizes the realization that Annabel is dead to the speaker and him being able to talk about her horror of a death. Next, there are the ‘winged seraphs of heaven’ (line 11) that apparently ‘envied’ the speaker and Annabel. The seraphs/angels are normally supposed to be the good guys, but in the poem the speaker sees them as the bad guys who took his beloved Annabel Lee away from him. Poe’s use of symbols was prodigious allowing the reader to see the dark side of this love story and how the speaker at times seemed deluded about the love he has for …show more content…
I feel as if the speaker could not cope with the idea that his true love Annabel was dead and their love had ended. That is the reason I believe that he started to blame the seraphs/angels and her highborn kinsman for her death. The speaker believed that because their love was utterly perfect that “the angels, not half so happy in heaven/Went envying her and me-”, in which the angels apparently killed Annabel by ‘chilling and killing’ (line 21-22&26) her causing her to die (Poe 21-22). Annabel’s highborn kinsman are blamed as well because they tried to keep Annabel away from the speaker and when the speaker said they ‘shut her up’ (line 19) the speaker makes it sound like the imprisoned Annabel away forcefully from him in a prison cell the ‘sepulchre’. Overall, through Poe’s use of symbols and imagery the reader is able to understand what is going on between the speaker’s and Annabel’s love. Unfortunately, this is an example of how love had a strong grip on the speaker giving him a positive and negative outlook on love. With this in mind, the love that the speaker once shared with Annabel caused him to become delusional at times which inflicted damage to the speaker making him lose his mind. Love, inevitably took a toll on the speaker’s well-being with not being able to cope with the loss of his one and only love