An Analysis of "Annabel Lee"Most people agree that Edgar Allan Poe wrote "Annabel Lee" about his late wife, Virginia Clemm, who died of tuberculosis two years before. Some critics, however, argue that in the seventh line of the poem he states, "I was a boy and she was a girl," and he certainly was not a boy in 1836, at twenty-seven, when he married his thirteen-year-old. wife. Perhaps the poem is about a former love, or perhaps it is purely imaginary, but by addressing Annabel Lee as his "life and [his] bride" in line thirty-eight, and writing it two years after the death of his beloved young wife, it seems logical that it is actually written about her and is simply embellished with a bit of poetic license. In this poem, Poe writes primarily with a combination of iambic and anapestic feet, alternating between tetrameter and trimeter. The word “chilling,” however, is allowed in both places it is used, lines fifteen and twenty-five, to maintain its strident trochaic meter (a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable). This is most likely done to exploit the provocative effect of that meter; the death of the speaker's loved one disturbs the rhythm of the poem and surprises the reader. The final rhyme of the poem alternates lines with little variation and has little meaning; the repeated rhyming words are: "Lee", "sea", "me" and "we". In "Annabel Lee" the speaker claims in lines eleven and twelve that the angels were jealous of the happy couple: "the winged seraphim of heaven lusted after me and her." The envious angels, he insists, caused the wind to chill his bride and take her life. However, he claims, their love, stronger than the love of older or wiser couples, can never be defeated: And neither the corners up there in the sky, nor the demons down there under the sea, can ever separate my soul from the soul of the beautiful. Annabel Lee. (lines 33-36) The diction of the poem immerses the reader in the speaker's realm of fantasy love shared with his bride. He begins the poem with the first two lines: “It was many, many years ago, / In a kingdom by the sea,” just like “once upon a time, in a far-off land” of fairy tales. The couple lived with no other thought than that of loving each other and «loving each other with a love that was more than love" (9).