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“Annabel Lee” is perhaps the last poem that Edgar Allan Poe completed in his lifetime. He wrote it the year he died, 1849, and it was published the following year. As with many of Poe’s poems, this one concerns the untimely death of a beautiful young woman. The poem’s speaker is the melancholy former lover of the young woman named in the title. Across seven stanzas of variable length and meter, he tells of his tragic loss. The speaker claims that, when they were young, their connection was so potent that it aroused the jealousy of the angels. In their envy, the angels allegedly caused a cold wind to blow on Annabel Lee, who then caught a mortal chill, died, and was buried in a tomb by the sea. “Annabel Lee” is a lyric poem that reveals as much about the speaker’s distraught mental state as it does about the tragic event he narrates. Perhaps due to his anxiety about being forever closed off from his beloved, the speaker makes exaggerated claims about the exceptional and eternal nature of their bond. At the poem’s end, the speaker enters his deceased bride’s tomb, possibly preparing himself to die “by the sounding sea” (line 41).

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