Poe is Woe and Woe is Poe: The me I see in Annabel Lee

Back in high school, when my taste for horror and the related genres was much higher (as was I!) I loved to dig into the short stories of these masters of disaster, especially those of Kafka and Poe. To me, if Kafka spelled "catastrophe," then Poe surely meant "woe," and these twin towers of impending doom never failed to give me a good time, in a bad sort of way.  Then came college, and my sadness focus shifted to Edgar Allan, not only because he (too) wrote poetry, but also spoke of a real, really heavy relationship with a woman! And so, just as my fondness for Poe's prose goes way back, my admiration for "Annabel Lee" dates from "many and many a year ago" as well. And thus, when considering both my "old flames" and current love(s), this poem not only demonstrates Tyson's conjecture that "reader-response theorists believe that even the same reader reading the same text on two different occasions will probably produce different meanings ..." (pg.170) but in my case proves Donald W. Hall's point #8 that, "It is possible to [still] enjoy a work of literature and [now, at least to a large extent] disagree with the author!"

First, from a strictly structuralist standpoint, one is amazed that "Annabel" succeeds despite such a simplistic rhyme scheme. I can vouch from experience that for most budding poets, ending all six verses with virtually the same rhyme scheme ("me," "sea," and "Lee," with the exception of verse five, where "we" is substituted for "me") would be a recipe for disaster, as in a "D" or worse. How, then, does Poe pull this poem off? Certainly, the internal rhyme (especially in the last verse) helps, as does the heavy dose of alliteration. Yet even the internal rhyme is inconsistent, and much of the alliteration ("many and many," "But we loved with a love that was more than love") repeats the exact same words as well. I argue that the simple structure succeeds largely because it is built around a simple theme. Of course, "Annabel" is not written around just any simple theme, but the simple theme, that of a lost love. Furthermore, "Lee" is not just any lost lover, but a beautiful, tragic, young one drawn from the poet's deepest personal experience ...

After reading over my poems, I'm sure any decent critic could tell you that "A Song of Sue" and "The Endless River and the Timeless Tree" both owe a significant debt to "A-Lee" based on structure alone. Repeated end rhymes "tree" and "me" ("ER/TT") "Sue" and "you" ("SOS") echo "Annabel," as do the alliteration, "Many a moment her mood would mellow" ("SOS"), and the internal rhyme with similar sounding words, "I could see that she was lonely" ("ER/TT"). Still, these similarities certainly could be dismissed as nothing more than literary coincidences if not for the mirrored themes. For it is at the level of lost love that my literary kinship with Poe both deepens and departs.

In a general sense, it is quite easy for me to identify with a fellow poet who, despite attaining a certain amount of critical success from writing during his lifetime, was also (in the words of Wikipedia), "forced to make humiliating pleas for money for the rest of his life." But as the poems show, it was far more than the struggle to make ends meet through writing that we shared. As you probably know, Poe (at age 26) married his thirteen year old cousin, Virginia Clemm. But what you didn't know was as a 21-year-old senior at Notre Dame, I began dating my first "true" love—a 16-year-old from the nearby town of Granger. Now in retrospect, I suppose dating a 16-year-old girl (she turned 17 two months into our relationship!) at age 21 wasn't exactly as much of a scandal as marrying your 13-year-old cousin, but being a senior at college and being seen around a Catholic campus with a high school sophomore (to add insult to injury, she lost a year when transferring and was thus six years behind me in school!) sometimes seemed like it. But, damn all those know-it-alls who "were older" and "far wiser" than we; "our love ... was stronger by far" than theirs, I thought, and like my poet and mentor, I was determined to make it work!

But before I go into how Poe and I (and me and Sue) failed, we should take a little time out to settle what seems to me a silly controversy. I, like most critics, seem to imply that "Annabel" is definitely about Poe's wife Virginia, while others say it is about his first—and last—love, Elmira Royster Shelton (Poe was reunited and engaged to his childhood sweetheart Elmira shortly before he died) and a third school says it is merely Poe's take on an old Navy tale about a girl named Annabel Lee which he heard when stationed in the Army. Quite frankly, I think all three are true; "Annabel" was the last thing Poe wrote before he died and actually did dedicate it to Shelton, and it would be difficult to believe Edgar didn't at least lift the title from that old tale, along with a few details. I know from my own writing that basing a story on a single person/situation is not the way it usually works; for example, Sue did not smoke or do drugs (that was someone else) — to Sue the party itself was the drug. But it would be equally ridiculous to not attribute the main body of Edgar's poem, which says "she was a child," "my wife and my bride" to whom "the wind came ... chilling and killing" to Poe's child-bride who died of tuberculosis, just as it would be silly to say my two poems were not about Sue because of a few details that didn't fit. But now, back to our story ...

Not that my break-up from Sue was as dramatic (or deadly) as Poe's from Virginia, but the feelings at first were very similar. Notice that in the stanzas of the true romantic poets, you are not going to find much stuff about paying the bills, following their stocks, or taking out the garbage. These poems generally revolve solely around the two lovers, with some cool nature scenes in the background for good measure. Still, because such poets don't really fall back on these material things in relationships, when the poets do fall, they fall hard. "Song of Sue" shares (although not as completely) "Annabel's" sense of melancholy, whereas "The Endless River" contains a few scenes of the type of desperate drinking Poe (and its author) did after the break-up. But it is at this point the two poets diverge. While Poe blames "the angels in heaven" and later "the demons down under" for his lover's death (and his own demise) O'Toole has the God of heaven delivering him (albeit in rather dramatic fashion) from his deep depression. "In the end, God was the only guy" (an awkward line for a situation I couldn't quite yet put into words) to show that, both from a maturity and different beliefs in God standpoint, this relationship could not last. And, despite an ending probably a bit too sentimental for O'Connor (at least I didn't conclude with "they lived happily ever after," Flannery!) "Endless River" did add hope to the message of "Song of Sue" by looking forward to new relationships with God's help. It also proved prophetic; Sue Wood did become quite successful in the business world, far more so than her former boyfriend. And Tom O'Toole did find a remarkable woman of deep faith, a faith so deep that she would love him through the lean times when his lack of worldly talents seemed to fail his family, at least financially. But that's another story—and poem!

Since nearly everyone in the history of the world has lost a love at some time or another, almost everybody can identify with "Annabel Lee" at some level, and as a fellow poet who also "lost" a young girl, I'd like to think my identification with the poem goes a little deeper than most. But although Poe knew woe, he did not know "who lived here." Hopefully, I can add to Poe's insights by showing those "much younger than myself ... who does."