Saturday, January 30, 2016

What did Annabel Lee's kinsmen do when she died in "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe?

's poem
"" tells the story of two young lovers who lived together in a "kingdom by the
sea." Their love was "a love that was more than love." For that reason (in the
narrator's telling), the "wing¨d seraphs of Heaven" became jealous of the lovers, and
sent a cold wind that "chill[ed]" and killed Annabel Lee. 

When
Annabel Lee dies,

Her highborn kinsmen came


And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulchre


In this kingdom by the sea.

Narrowly speaking,
this passage tells us that Annabel Lee's kinsmen buried her in a sepulchrea small room, usually
carved out of a rock, in which dead people are entombed.

The poem also says
Annabel Lee's kinsmen "bore her away" from the narrator. The meaning of this phrase is
more ambiguous. It may mean, very simply, that Annabel Lee's kinsmen took her body away from the
narrator in order to properly bury it. The fact that the kinsmen are described as
"highborn" suggests that the narrator may have been of lower social status, however,
and that in "bearing her away," the kinsmen are also reclaiming Annabel Lee after she
made an undesirable attachment to someone below her station.

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