I would like to know the theme of the poem Annabel Lee

-- Anonymous, June 11, 2003

Answers

Refusal of the narrator to accept the breaking of the love bond by death. Love, the unstable nature of the obsessive narrator and a lot of things embedded in symbolic onomatopaeia, the fixation on the shore boundary of all things, surround this basic mood and statement. Note that though the ballad purports to tell of Annabel Lee it is only a sketch within the greater theme of what the narrator is undergoing.

Most ballads just tell the story for the story's emotional power. Here, the storyteller(rather his inner state) IS the story, a level of deceptive interplay most readers still don't get as in many of his other short stories.

-- Anonymous, June 14, 2003