The tone of “Annabel Lee” is melancholy and distraught. The conditions of Annabel Lee’s death are tragic, and the speaker’s evident grief over his lost beloved casts a dark cloud of mournfulness over the entire poem. As he casts his mind back to the time when she died, the speaker grows increasingly melancholy. His compulsion to repeat words and phrases expresses an intense sadness and longing. It also indicates how emotionally distraught he feels. In particular, he fixates on the image of his deceased beloved being “shut…up in a sepulchre” (line 19). His anxiety about being forever closed off from Annabel Lee causes him to make an exaggerated claim about the eternal nature of their “love that was more than love” (line 9). The more agitated he feels, the more inflated his claims become regarding how exceptional their love was. Hence, in the sixth stanza, he claims that no angelic or demonic force could ever break their eternal bond. The only hint of peace in the entire poem comes in the final stanza, when the speaker appears ready to put an end to his sadness and agitation by joining his beloved in her seaside tomb.