In "Annabel Lee," how does the speaker react to Annabel Lee's death?

The
speaker's reaction is certainly one of
undying dedication. 

"" can
be read in the context of
American Romanticism. It employs language to evoke mood and emotion;
it uses
elements of the supernatural (e.g., angels, winged seraphs of heaven, and demons)
to
illustrate the extraordinary nature of the narrator's love for the
subject.

Because you are focused on the narrator's
reaction, I would look to the last three
stanzas. In the fourth stanza, we
learn how Annabel Lee died: "That the wind came out of
the cloud, chilling /
And killing my Annabel Lee." Exposure to cold and dampness (she lives
by the
sea) was a concern in the 19th century. Perhaps it was pneumonia that took

her. 

In the fifth stanza, the narrator expresses what was different
about
his love for Annabel Lee. They were spiritually connected spiritually
long before her
death: 

But our love it
was stronger by far than the
love

Of those who were older
than we

Of many far wiser
than we

And
neither the angels in heaven above

Nor the
demons down
under the sea,

Can ever dissever my soul from the
soul

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

In the first three
lines, you have the voice of
a youth who believes that no one can understand the depth of his
emotion,
another characteristic of Romantic literature. For him, their love transcended age,
and
notions of good and evil. His evocation of demons and angels also
suggests the possibility that
their love transcended the boundaries of
religion and the church.

In the
final stanza, the narrator
describes how Annabel Lee is present in his memory:

For the moon never beams without bringing me
dreams

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise but I see the
bright eyes

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

She has thus become a part of everything in death. She belongs not only to
the
narrator, but to the universe. 

The last few lines are
less spiritual. The
poem becomes dark, even morbid:

And so, all the nighttide,
I lie down by the
side

Of my darling, my darling, my life and my

bride,

In her sepulcher there by the sea

In her
tomb by
the side of the sea.

Here, it
seems that the narrator
wishes to join her in death: He lies down by his
"bride" in
"her sepulcher," in "her
tomb."

Depending on how one wishes to read the poem, this
could be affirmative to Annabel
Lee's memory: the speaker will never forget
her. Or it could be dark: he is trying to climb into
the grave with her. The
latter reading would make it more explicitly Gothic, and much of Edgar
Allen
Poe's work is in the early American Gothic tradition.

The
narrator's
reaction can thus depend on one's choice of how to read the
poem.