Annabel Lee is the last complete poem by Edgar Allan Poe, written in 1849 and published two days after his death. In a musical ballad, the speaker mourns a beautiful young woman he loved as a child in a kingdom by the sea, and whose death, he says, could not break their love.
The ballad
The speaker tells how he and Annabel Lee loved each other with a love so great that even the angels envied it. A cold wind came out of a cloud and killed her.
Yet he insists that neither angels nor demons can separate their souls, and he lies down every night beside her tomb by the sea.
Music and repetition
The poem's power comes from its repetitions, its internal rhymes and the recurring rhyme on the name Annabel Lee.
Poe believed that the death of a beautiful woman was the most poetic subject, and this poem is its purest expression.
Virginia
Many readers see in Annabel Lee a memory of Poe's wife, Virginia Clemm, who died of tuberculosis in 1847 at the age of twenty-four.
Other women in Poe's life have also been proposed as models, and the question remains open.
Anecdotes
Published after his death
The poem appeared in the New York Daily Tribune on 9 October 1849, two days after Poe died in Baltimore.
Set to music
Annabel Lee has been set to music many times, by composers and by singers such as Joan Baez.
Frequently asked questions
When was Annabel Lee published?
In October 1849, just after Poe's death.
Where did the lovers live?
In a kingdom by the sea.
Who might have inspired the poem?
Poe's wife Virginia, according to many readers.