Looking at the poem "Annabel Lee" as a short story, what are the elements in terms of plot?

-- Anonymous, January 19, 2003

Answers

Setting: long ago in vague "kingdom by the sea"(but remember that detail as it usually works subconsciously when the end comes).

Introduces the maiden whose only description is that she was "child" and completely in love with the narrator. Next a bitter tone describes their love in apposition to their elders and the spirits beyond and ascribes envy as the motive. A wind comes and chills and sickens her. She dies and is whisked off to her tomb by her "highborn kinsmen" so that both their human opposition and the angels have separated the couple, body ans soul respectively. What survives, the narrator claims is the bond of love even though they are no longer united.

That explains the chilling assertion at the end where he constantly stays near her tomb at the edge of existence and exile. Now presumably we are to believe this has been going on "many and many a year".

One is reminded of similar tragic lovers in ballads and Irish folklore where the perfect couple dies apart by some muderous act of others even gods. Only here the tale falls back on the existential state of the poet(bereaved, faithful,rebellious, hermetic), unresolved even by death.

-- Anonymous, January 20, 2003

If you research it correctly, you will find that Annabel Lee is poes' last poem. That is because, two years before his young wife(virgnia clemm), whom he was deeply in love with, had died from tuberculousis. He went on writing and lecturng for a while, but he was a brokn man. Later, he wrote Annabel Lee and spread several copies throughout his friends. They were to pubish te poem as soon as h passed on, he dearly wanted th message of the poem to gt through to people. Two days later he was found unconcious on a street, and soon after died of what was described as "consumption of the brain" It is by belief that he commited suicide , as hidden in the poem lines 40-44 , to be with his dear love once agin. The poem was Poes' last contribution to the world of literacture

-- Anonymous, December 15, 2003