I think we could
certainly describe this poem using the phrase "hauntingly tragic," though these words
never appear in the poem itself.
The speaker is in love with a young woman
named , but she became very ill and died, prompting her family to come and take her body, hold a
funeral, and inter her. The speaker believes that the angels must have envied the happiness that
he and Annabel Lee felt with one another and conspired to disrupt and end it. This is what makes
the poem so tragic.
However, the speaker also says, in the final stanza, that
he goes to her sepulcherthe place where her body is buriedand he lies with her dead body each
night. This is what makes the poem so haunting.
For similar reasons, we could
describe the poem as disturbingly tender. The narrator's habit of
sleeping with his dead lover in her tomb is disturbing, though there is a tenderness in his love
for her that we must recognize.
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