Quote:
Originally Posted by MeepyCat  It's a lovely poem, but it is all kinds of twisted. Basically, the angels murder the little girl because they're jealous.
I'm an English major. Like many of my kind, I am careful about symbolism. I would read this poem to my kid any day. Poe has these great strong rhythms, we could probably drum to it. I would not hang it up as a decoration in the nursery.
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I was an English major (I dual-majored actually, English and Economics) and I guess I missed the day when they went down the list and read the artist's explanation behind each of their works. Here I was thinking that it was up to each individual person to draw their own meaning from literature of any kind. To think I graduated. Oh, the horror!
Poe fixated on loss because loss is what he knew. His father abandoned the family, his mother died a year later, his foster father ran hot-and-cold with him, he had to withdraw from college after less than a year because his foster father - despite having come into a large inheritance - did not give me enough money for the expenses, his fiancé married another man, poverty forced him into joining the Army, his foster father wouldn't answer his desperate letters when he tried to get out of the army - not even to tell him his foster mother was sick, when his foster father remarried bitter fights with his new wife led him to disown Poe, he purposely went about getting himself court-martialed from his commission at West Point after his foster father disowned him, right after his third book was published his brother died due to alcoholism, lost his first real publishing job due to being found drunk on the job by his boss, married his thirteen-year-old cousin (Virginia Clemm, often thought to be the inspiration behind
Annabel Lee) only to watch her slowly die of tuberculosis at twenty-four, he began drinking even more heavily and thus acting even more erratically, his attempts to court a fellow poet were constantly being undercut by her mother, finally he returned to his hometown and took up with the past fiancé that left him for another man.
I'm sure you knew all of this. I only wrote it to help drive the point home: loss was all he knew. He was an artist. Most artists are tortured in one way or another. An unoriginal thought, yes, but that does not make it any less true.
Perhaps my history clouds things for me, perhaps it makes things clearer. I suppose I'll never know.
A long story as short as I can make it (I'm not look for sympathy, I'm just stating the facts): I ended up in coma, near death, after my mother dumped my body in the parking lot of a local hospital in between a huge mass of cars. Knowing she was going to be in trouble (an understatement, I know) she killed herself before the cops got to our apartment. My father, shocked by what happened, had a heart attack just outside my room and died. I was nine. It'll be twenty-years tomorrow that I ended up in the hospital and Friday is the anniversary of my father's death.
Death is a part of life, it's true. But more importantly
Annabel Lee is one of FoxintheSnow's favorite poems, has been for a long time. She named her daughter after something she loves and wants to share it with her. The poem may not have a traditional "happy ending," but I'm betting Annabel's childhood does. Despite all that happened to me, I'm still living mine. I was raised by my (divorced) grandparents. They got a house and slowly worked at putting me back together again. When I say Mom and Dad, they're who I'm talking about. It's cliché, but if we couldn't feel loss, then we couldn't feel joy. It's how we know what makes us happy so that we can make healthy choices in our lives.
(So, so sorry for the thread-jack. It's a hard week, although that's no excuse.
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Edgar Allen Poe was an amazing poet... so many of his poems are simply amazing!! 
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