The Highwayman

For those of us who love a touch of romance and tragedy, this poem gives more than enough of it. Unfortunately, the book's preview is nothing like the poem. I wouldn't advise you to read Kiss of The Highwayman unless you want to.

Alfred Noyes' poem is the perfect example of a wonderfully written poem. It rhymes, it builds, it masterfully uses repetition… what can I say? It's a masterpiece. Alfred Noyes, born in 1880, published this poem in Forty Singing Seamen and Other Poems, in 1907. It is arguably his most beloved poem.

The Lady of Shallot

This beautiful poem is told in true Tennyson fashion. It is a tale of King Arthur's court, and is filled with the magic that comes with tales such as these. It is a special treat to read again.

Where you can view the poem with art work. It is a lovely experience. Tennyson taught me the art of using figurative language. He also helped me develop pacing and rhyme.

The Raven

This poem and I go way back. We met in the sixth grade and I've frequently revisited it since. I love Poe. He may have been a drunk in his day but I still think he was an awesome writer. He's amazing, dark yes, but also amazing. I recommend Poe to all aspiring poets. This sadly tragic and painful poem helped me understand the importance of images. Just read it and see what effect the “shadow” in the last stanza has on you!

Annabel Lee

Ah, sweet and melancholy. Poe managed to capture a broad range of human emotions in his poem. Anger, love, passion, and sorrow, all drip from his pen, masterfully arranged by his genius. If you want to learn to move the heart of your reader, or if you'd like to know how the masters did it, this is the poem to read.

In Memoriam

image source

I recommend that you read the whole thing. I remember stumbling upon it in my AP English textbook, my beloved Norton. At once I was captured by the pain and the passion, the sorrow, and the anguish that Tennyson poured out onto those pages. Each poem breathed with life I'd never seen before. I want to share a little bit of his poem here,

“I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel:
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within” (Tennyson, 5). Can you feel that? That is pure beauty.

I encourage all aspiring poets to study these writers. Study all of the poets you can get your hands on, but especially these; these are the ones that will be your foundation; these are the ones that will make others wonder at your mastery of the language, at your instinctive pacing and internal rhyme, at your ability to let the poem run wild and yet have it stream from the paper and to the reader like a powerful beam of sunlight into one central direction. Happy reading! Till next time.

Mary Cecilia Rogers worked as a salesgirl for John Anderson, who had a cigar shop on Broadway. In 1840, New York was even more "Victorian" than London, and young unmarried girls were not to be found behind shop counters, particularly not if the shops were frequented exclusively by young men. Mary drew many new customers to the shop, but - as Thomas Duke noticed in his Celebrated Criminal Cases of America (1910) - "she did not hesitate to repl all undue advances".

One day in January 1841, Mary failed to appear. Her mother had no idea where she was, nor had her employer, Mr. Anderson. The police searched for her, the newspapers reported her disappearance... but six days later, Mary reappeared, looking tired and rather ill."

I visited some relatives in the country," she said. Her mother and her employer corroborated the story, but then there began to circulate a rumour that she had been seen with a tall and handsome naval officer, and only a few days after returning, Mary gave up her job abruptly. A month later she announced her engagement to the clerk David Payne, who was one of the boarders of her mothers boarding-house in Nassau Street.  

On Sunday, 25 July, at 10 a.m., Mary knocked on her fiancé's door and said she was going to see her aunt in Bleecker Street. Payne also wanted to spend the day away from home, but he would call for her that evening. Towards the evening however, a violent thunderstorm came on and he decided not to call for Mary, but to let her stay the night with her aunt. "When Payne returned from work and learned that Mary was still away," Colin Wilson writes in his book World Famous Unsolved Crimes, "he rushed to see the aunt in Bleecker Street - a Mrs Downing - and was even more alarmed when she told him that she had not seen Mary in the past forty-eight hours."

E.A. Poe Reading Annabel Lee 

Daniel Payne - who did not go see the corpse, although he had searched for Mary all over New York - was interrogated by the police, and released. A large reward was offered, but a week passed without any clues. Then the coroner received a letter from some anonymous man, who wrote he had not come forward before from "motives of perhaps criminal prudence". This man claimed to have seen Mary Rogers on the Sunday afternoon of her disappearance. She stepped out of a boat with six rough-looking characters and walked with them into the woods, laughing and apparently under no kind of constraint. Soon afterwards a boat with three well-dressed men came ashore, and these men asked if someone had seen a young woman in the company of six men. When the anonymous writer told them he had seen this girl, the trio turned their boat and headed back for New York.

"The next important piece of information came from a stagecoach driver named Adams," Colin Wilson reports, "who said he had seen Mary arrive on the Hoboken ferry with a well-dressed man of dark complexion, and that they had gone to a roadhouse called Nick Mullen's. This tavern was kept by a Mrs Loss, who told the police that the couple had 'taken refreshment' there, then gone off into the woods. Some time later she had heard a scream from the woods; but since the place 'was a resort of questionable characters' she had thought no more of it."On 25 September, the missing petticoat of Mary Rogers was found by children playing in the woods. They also found a white silk scarf, a parasol and a handkerchief marked "M.R." Soon after, Daniel Payne committed suicide in this spot. Now a gambler named Joseph Morse was arrested, because he had been seen with Mary on the evening of her disappearance. But he could prove he had been that afternoon at Staten Island with another young lady, and was released.

In the following year, Poe's Mystery of Marie Rogêt was published in three parts in Snowden's Ladies Companion. "There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural," he started his famous detective story, "by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them. (...) The extraordinary details which I am now called upon to make public, will be found to form, as regards sequence of time, the primary branch of a series of scarcely intelligible coincidences, whose secondary or concluding branch will be recognized by all readers in the late murder of MARY CECILIA ROGERS, at New York. (...) When, in an article entitled The Murders in the Rue Morgue, I endeavored, about a year ago, to depict some very remarkable features in the mental character of my friend, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, it did not occur to me that I should ever resume the subject."

The Mystery of Marie Roget, Trailer of the Classic Horror Mystery (1942)

Poe situated his story - with a little help from his "friend the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin" - in Paris, the Hudson was changed in the Seine, Mary Rogers in Marie Rogêt, David Payne in St. Eustache and so on. But Poe followed the main facts of the murder of Mary Rogers and argued that the girl was not murdered by a gang, but by a single individual.  The signs of a struggle in the woods and the battered state of her face indicated she was killed by an individual, because there would not have been a struggle between a gang and a weak and helpless girl. A gang would have overpowered Mary easily. And if Mary was attacked by a gang, there would have been at least one guy who would have taken the handkerchief away, that could identify their victim easily as Mary Rogers.

Poe spoke of a strip from the girl's skirt that had been wound around the waist and that, with a "sailor's knot", could afford a kind of handle for carrying the body. Chevalier Dupin aka Edgar Allan Poe thought of either a fatal accident - perhaps the result of an abortion - that was made up to look like a brutal murder perpetrated in the thicket were the petticoat was found, or a brutal murder "by a lover, or at least by an intimate and secret associate of the deceased. This associate is of swarthy complexion."  The sailor's knot and the "dark complexion" of the well-dressed man who was seen with Mary, pointed to a seaman "above the grade of the common sailor". During her first disappearance, Mary was seen in the company of "a young naval officer, notorious for its excesses."

"Let us know the full history of "the officer", with his present circumstances, and his whereabouts at the precise period of the murder. Let us carefully compare with each other the various communications sent to the evening paper, in which the object was to inculpate a gang. (...) And, all of this done, let us again compare these various communications with the known MSS. of the officer. Let us endeavor to ascertain (...) something more of the personal appearance and bearing of the 'man of dark complexion'.

Je Suis Animal / Marie Roget

At this point, Edgar Allan Poe, an author who was known for his brilliant pointes, ended his "article" with a cheap trick. The "publisher" declared in a footnote that it was inappropriate to reveal the truth and the identity of the perpetrator. Why the author suddenly could not or would not do anymore what he had promised just a few pages before: to track down the "naval officer with the dark complexion"?

Perhaps because Edgar Allan Poe knew all about the "seaman's knot"? He had spent a lot of time in harbours. In March 1830 he was admitted to the military academy of West Point. He was fired because of insubordination, but he always kept his military overcoat. In 1837, Edgar Poe rented a few rooms in Manhattan, in a house that belonged to the famous bookseller William Gowans. His shop on Broadway, near the tobacco-store of Anderson, became Poe's office and meeting place. It was here that he probably met Mary Cecilia Rogers.

In 1841, his tubercular child female Virginia was very sick. Poe visited the most vicious neighborhoods of Philadelphia, where he did his intense readings of The Raven, the poem that so eloquently dealt with his obsession with death and destruction. As a sado-necrofiliac, Poe had good reasons to flee a dying, blood-spitting woman, because in his "spirit of the perverse", the death of a beloved woman gave him "poetic chills". A few years after the murder of Miss Rogers, he wandered around on the scene of the crime, looking for a "Mary". He finally landed in the arms of a youth girlfriend who lived there, Mary Devereaux. 

Poe died a few days after he disappeared without a trace, in October 1849, because of a combined abuse of alcohol, opium and laudanum. He was barely 40. In the face of death he called repeatedly for a certain Reynolds, the explorer whose expedition to the Antarctic Ocean encouraged Poe to write the story of Arthur Gordon Pym. But another - G.W.M. - Reynolds played an important role in The Mystery of Mary Cecilia Rogers, as the literary editor of Snowden's Ladies Companion...

Christopher Walken Reading The Raven by E.A. Poe 

In the papers of the late G.W.M. Reynolds a letter has been found, barely readable and written by a person who... Here are some quotes from it:

"Normally and naturally, there is a strong analogy between the handwriting and the character of every human being. The manuscripts of the various writers, although they show a certain degree of diversity in the design and size of the letters, have undoubtedly a number of characteristics in common... Without exception they exhibit the same tenacity and single-mindedness, and also they all fail to deal with a certain, I would say constitutional, shake of the writer's hand... What can we deduce from these observations? Apparently, the writer has done the effort to draw each letter in a different handwriting, thus creating the impression that there were different writers at work. 

The style of the letters, in which the soul of the writer is revealed, confirms this conclusion. Symptomatic is the frequent use of inversion. He writes, for example, not a 'superhuman strength', but 'a strength, superhuman'. These letters are the result of a literary tour de force. I would say here is a man at work with an exceptional talent in the field of imitation!

It is precisely this consideration that brings us one step further on the road to the unmasking of the culprit. At the time of the first disappearance of Marie, among the faithful visitors of the perfume shop of Monsieur Le Blanc, was the infamous poet Edouard T. Foubert. If I had to describe this man, I would say he is about thirty years old, good looking, always well dressed... His complexion is pale, but his skin has a bright, olive-colored tint. This pale face shows a sharp contrast with his dark eyes and almost black hair, fine as silk. I think his dark eyes and black hair are accentuated by his pale complexion, and not vice versa.

Now, we have already pointed out that the killer of Marie Rogêt has to be a naval officer, and not a poet.  But our description of monsieur Edouard T. Foubert is not yet complete. He like to wear a black coat... with the collar of a cadet or a soldier, the only remnant of his training as an officer. Mister Foubert however had to leave the Navy, on charges of alcohol abuse.

I have already informed the prefect of my findings and if I am not mistaken, one of these days our newspaper will report that the police has finally solved the mystery of Marie Rogêt!

Like many of his works of versification, Poe's inspiration for “The Raven” lies in his childhood while under the care of Frances and John Allan in the antebellum South of Richmond, Virginia. In 1815, when Edgar was six years old, the Allan household maintained a parrot that could recite the English alphabet and many years later Poe mentioned to his friend and colleague Cornelius Matthews that the spirit of a talkative raven had haunted him all his life. “That bird, that imp bird pursues me, perpetually,” he said. “I cannot rid myself of its presence. I hear its croak. . . the flap of its wings constantly in my ear.” Thus, Poe's choice of a raven as his messenger of doom and the articulator of the haunting “Nevermore” is a representation of his own personal demons as shown by his confession to Mathews. The “Ghastly grim and ancient Raven” is also a reflection of the poem's unidentified narrator who undoubtedly is Poe himself--a grieving, elocuting hero who succumbs to a fatal flaw in his personality via the ominous bird from some very dark and unknown land, perhaps Hell itself.

The poetical tone of “The Raven” revolves around sadness and melancholy which Poe called “the most legitimate emotions” in poetry. After much contemplation on a central theme for the poem, Poe decided to utilize “the most melancholic of all topics,” namely death and oblivion, the final lifting of the veil which comes to all of us. Poe also decided that, as a character, the ominous bird must be emblematic, a symbol of “mournful and never-ending remembrance.”

“The Raven” opens with one of the most memorable lines of any American poem--”Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary/Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,” which indicates that the narrator is an emotionally burdened scholar who, as Poe scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott observes, “often turned from one volume to another and back again,” due to his spiritual restlessness. As the narrator ponders over the numerous tomes before him, he suddenly hears “a tapping/As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door” (line 4) which upsets his meditations and prompts him to reflect on this occurrence as “Only this, and nothing more” (line 6).

According to Poe biographer Arthur Hobson Quinn, the “rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore” (line 11) in the second stanza is a reference to Jane Stanard (1793-1824), the inspiration for the classic poem “To Helen. Stanard, the mother of Edgar's boyhood friend Robert Stanard, was sixteen years Poe's senior in 1823, yet he loved her “passionately and devoutedly” as mentioned in a letter to his longtime supporter George Eveleth in 1845. After Stanard's death in 1824 from an apparent brain tumor, Edgar visited her grave at Shockoe Hill Cemetery for months on end, often spending hours there in a state of utter grief. Thus, the narrator's Lenore, at least in the domain of his lonely chamber, remains “Nameless here, forevermore” (line 12).

“And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain” (line 13) in the third stanza conveys the narrator's emotional connection to the color purple

as a symbol of mourning for a loved one who has passed into the eternal night of the grave. The metaphorical movement of the curtains by gentle breezes at the window represents the spirit of Lenore attempting to make her presence known to the narrator, who “to still the beating of my heart” (line 15) regards the rapping at his door as merely “This. . . and nothing more” (line 18), a sign of his conscious acceptance that the rustling is nothing but the wind and not the invisible fingers of his long-lost Lenore.

In the fourth stanza, as a result of the rustling of the curtains and the tapping at his door, the narrator rises from his seat near the fireplace. The door pivots open and he finds “Darkness there, and nothing more” (line 24), a revelation of his dark, wandering imagination, due to his melancholy over the loss of his beloved Lenore.

As he gazes into the darkness outside his door while “Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before” (line 26) in the fifth stanza, a calm desperation overcomes him and he whispers into the night “Lenore!” with the hope that she is truly there. But to his regret, the night only echoes back “Lenore!” amid the cold December darkness, a stark reminder of his “mournful and never-ending remembrance” which turns out to be “Merely this and nothing more” (line 30).

As he discovers and accepts the situation, the narrator in the sixth stanza turns back into his sullen chamber with “all my soul within me burning” (line 31), an allusion to his regret for failing to see Lenore amid the blackness of the evening. But then he hears “a tapping, somewhat louder than before” (line 32) which compels him to move to the window lattice “and this mystery explore” (line 34). With continued suspicion that the spirit of Lenore does indeed dwell just beyond the threshold, he laments and sighs that surely “Tis the wind and nothing more” (line 36).

In the seventh stanza, the ominous bird enters the chamber through the open window “with many a flirt and flutter” (line 37) and perches atop a bust of Pallas “just above my chamber door” (line 40), or a bust of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. As the Gods have decreed, Athena's heavenly consort on Mount Olympus is an owl, the very bird which Poe had initially considered as his messenger of doom before settling on a raven. Therefore, the bust of Pallas symbolizes the bird's timeless ability to foretell the future, much like Athena's gift of prophesy bestowed upon her by Zeus. While the narrator's despair is deepened by the raven's uncanny invocation of “Nevermore,” the line “Not the least obeisance made he; not an instant stopped or stayed he” (39) implies that the bird's only true purpose for being in the chamber is to pay homage to time as it continues its linear path between eternity and nothingness.

As the bird sits upon the bust of Pallas and forces the narrator into “beguiling my sad fancy into smiling” (line 43) in the eighth stanza, he then makes the odd observation “Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou. . . art sure no craven” (lines 45-46), a symbolic reference to a cowardly knight of medieval lore whose head was shaved due to his lack of courage on the battlefield. Yet the bird, as far as the narrator is concerned, is surely no “craven,” or a person without courage. Thus, the raven is a metaphorical contradiction with traits of bravery and cowardice, a knight in black armor with the heart of a weakling.

The bird is also a symbol of “the Night's Plutonian shore” (line 48), being Pluto, the Greek god of the underworld, an emblem of darkness, death and desolation. The narrator supports this, for he considers the bird to be "Ghastly, grim and ancient" (line 46). When he charges the bird as to “what thy lordly name is” (line 48), the raven croaks “Nevermore!” (line 49) which epitomizes the eternal and the preternatural realms of Time itself.

In the ninth stanza, the narrator bemuses with “Much I marveled this ungainly fowl” (line 50) via the bird's discourse of “Nevermore” which at first does not register any kind of meaning in the narrator's mind. He admits that word has “little meaning--little relevancy” (line 51), which shows his ignorance of it as a sign of perpetual damnation. The narrator also refers to himself as a “sublunary being” (line 52) or one who dwells in the ordinary terrestrial world while under the spell of Selene, the moon goddess.

In the tenth stanza, while the bird sits “lonely on the pallid bust” (line 56), the narrator becomes obsessed with “That one word,” the proverbial “Nevermore” as if “his soul. . . he did outpour” (line 57) with the mere mention of it. He then mutters to himself “Other friends have flown before/On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before” (lines 59-60). This indicates that he expects the bird to eventually fly away and return to the place of his origin, which at this point remains unclear. These “other friends” are obviously related to the women in Edgar's life who left him prematurely through death--his natural mother Elizabeth Arnold Poe, Frances Allan, his foster mother and Jane Stanard. It is interesting to note that Poe's wife Virginia, at the time “The Raven” was published, was dying from tuberculosis. Therefore, the bird symbolizes the narrator's hopelessness and his inability to maintain life-long romantic attachments due to the inevitability that all those he loves and adores will someday fly away into the realms of the unknown.

As he contemplates the bird's presence in his chamber, the narrator in the eleventh stanza ponders “Doubtless. . . what it utters is its only stock and store” (line 64), a reference to the bird's former “unhappy master” (line 65) who taught the bird to recite “that sad answer, Nevermore” (line 67). At this point in the poem, our melancholic narrator is linking one idea with another in order to formulate a logical reason why this ebony visitor continues to croak “Nevermore,” a possible sign, he assumes, of the bird's former owner who must also have been melancholy over the passing of a beloved other.

And now, with the raven “beguiling all my sad soul into smiling” (line 68), the narrator in the twelfth stanza wheels “a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust, and door” (line 69) and commences to “linking fancy unto fancy” (line 70) with the hope of determining exactly what the bird means by the repetitious “Nevermore.” His view of the bird as “grim, ungainly, ghastly (and) gaunt” (line 71) reflects his puzzlement over the personality of the bird as an unyielding visage of foreboding evil.

As he reclines “on the cushion's velvet lining” (line 76) in the thirteenth stanza, his mind turns to thoughts of his long-lost Lenore while the “fiery eyes” of the bird burn “into my bosom's core” (line 74). His remorse that “she shall press. . . ah, nevermore!” (line 79) the same velvet cushion under the lamplight indicates that Lenore is long dead and that the scent of her person still lingers on the cushion, much like the light being thrown upon it from a nearby oil lamp. The color of velvet, whether purple or red, also symbolizes blood, an association with the dreaded disease of consumption which took the lives of Elizabeth Arnold Poe in 1811 and eventually Virginia Clemm in 1847, two years after “The Raven” was first published in the Evening Mirror.

In the fourteenth stanza, the atmosphere of the chamber suddenly alters and becomes “denser, perfumed from an unseen censer” (line 80), a sign of Lenore's spirit inhabiting the chamber. He then determines “thy God hath lent thee--by (the) angels he has sent thee” (lines 82-83) which shows that the raven is now a messenger from Heaven sent to comfort him in his sorrow for the lost Lenore. Consequently, he attempts to drown these sorrows with “respite and nepenthe” (line 84) which Mabbott defines as a drink “of sovereign grace, devised by the Gods. . . to assuage the heart's grief.” But as the narrator wishes to “quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore” (line 85), the bird replies with the odious "Nevermore," sealing the narrator's fear that his sorrow will never be lifted and his desire to forget Lenore will forever remain unfulfilled.

The bird has now taken on the visage of a “Prophet. . . thing of evil” in the fifteenth stanza, a “prophet still, if bird or devil!” (line 87) due to his grief being unaffected by the nepenthe. He pleads with the bird to tell him “on this desert land enchanted--On this home by horror haunted” (lines 89-90) whether or not there is “balm in Gilead” (line 91), a legendary compound which relieves and heals the pains of the soul, a comforter for the ills manifested by the raven's unsettling repetition of “Nevermore.”

The narrator then confronts the bird in the sixteenth stanza with the question “Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn” I shall ever “clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore” (lines 95-96). This reference to Aidenn is a term for the Garden of Eden, but when the bird replies in the negative, the narrator realizes that Lenore is dead forever, in body and spirit and that she resides in neither Heaven nor Hell. This enrages him in the seventeenth stanza to the point of declaring “be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” (line 99), for he is now sickened by the bird's presence in his chamber. He orders it “back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!” (line 100) and to “take thy beak from out my heart!” (line 103) which symbolizes the penetration of his heart with a black arrow unlike that of Cupid or Eros. When the bird reiterates “Nevermore,' the dreaded fact that Lenore will eternally haunt his soul is thus set in stone.

In the final stanza, the narrator relinquishes his fate by stating “the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting, on the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door” (lines 105-06) and that his eyes “have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming” (line 107); therefore, the bird's true identity is that of a messenger of doom, akin to the albatross in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” which Edgar dutifully read as a child in Richmond. With the lamplight “streaming” and the bird's “shadow on the floor” (line 108), the narrator succumbs to his destiny and admits that his tortured soul “from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor/Shall be lifted--nevermore!” (lines 190-10), a doppleganger emblem--both the bird and the narrator are one, eternally melancholy and damned to Hell.

According to the American poet William Carlos Williams, “The Raven” is a poem which associates “words with figures. . . which Poe carried over to his new purpose--to find a way to tell his soul.” Thus, “The Raven” stands as a stark reminder of the sadness and grief that exists in the hearts of men perpetually filled with “quiet desperation.” The true irony of this poem lies in the fact that George H. Colton, editor of the American Review of New York City, paid Poe “not over $20” for this masterpiece of verse, the only payment Poe ever received, for there were no royalties or copyright laws. The spirit of Edgar Poe's savage muse, however, continues unabated, and the raven, his alter-ego, even after one hundred and fifty years, still is sitting on the pallid bust of Pallas just above his chamber door, gazing mournfully at the distant Aidenn and the night's Plutonian shore.

While many biographers conclude that Poe's wife was the real Annabel Lee, it is also possible that she was a fictional character. Annabel Lee was the main figure being spoken of in the poem, but she could also be considered as a symbol of a rare, pure and tender love. There was something about her description that evokes innocence, purity and childlikeness (characteristics that Virginia Clemm possibly had). It is indeed strange that Poe, an orphan and drunkard who had experienced so much cruelty from life, should marry a thirteen year old sickly girl. Perhaps, in his mind, there was an undying ideal, a longing to find tenderness and innocence in a woman and become united with her. This ideal notion was symbolized by Annabel Lee, and if she was indeed Virginia Clemm, we can say that Clemm was the only true love that Poe ever had.

In the first line of the poem, we can read, “it was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea”. The sea here was used to represent the speaker's memory. The entire phrase suggests that Annabel Lee's death occurred a very long time ago, but the sea speaks of reminiscence and an undying memory of love. This particular pattern was repeated in the succeeding stanzas, where each time the “kingdom by the sea” was mentioned, there was also a mention of things which belonged to a distant past. Poe wrote in the second stanza, “I was a child and she was a child, in this kingdom by the sea”. At the time this poem was written, Poe cannot be considered a child, as he was way past his early twenties. Clearly, he was simply using the word "sea" as a vehicle to illustrate unfading memory of a loved one which cannot be erased by time. He seems to be implying that the memory of love he had for his woman cannot be erased even after the pain of loss and death. Thus at the end of the poem, we can find him staying beside the dead girl's sepulchre by the sea.

The poem suggests that the speaker's love for Annabel Lee was of such divine and everlasting nature that it disturbed divine creatures themselves. The jealousy of the “winged seraphs of heaven” speaks strongly about the magnitude of the couple's love for each other. Obviously, the love was too much (it was a love that was more than love) that the heavenly beings chose to inflict death on poor Annabel. It is possible that the “winged seraphs” personify ill fate, and the “highborn kinsman” represents God Himself. The reason for the jealousy was not explained in the poem. Either Poe merely used it as a plausible excuse to justify an untimely death, or he simply wanted to blame ill fate, or possibly God, for the loss of his love. Or perhaps, poet as he was, he was just trying to sound a little bit more poetic. We can only surmise, because only Poe, dead in his grave and his love long been buried, has all the answers to the questions that belie "Annabel Lee".

The first area Genette identifies deals with the basic narrative mode. In “The Purloined Letter,” we find both "mimesis" and "diegesis". According to Genette, mimesis is a way of telling a story which creates the illusion “that we are "seeing" and "hearing" things for ourselves” while diegesis is a quick way of narrating, so as to give the reader only the most essential information, without telling how a certain situation happened. Here is a good example of this blending in Poe's story:

This functionary grasped [the letter] in a perfect agony of joy, opened it with a trembling hand, cast a rapid glance at its contents, and then, scrambling and struggling to the door, rushed at length unceremoniously from the room and from the house, without having uttered a syllable since Dupin had requested him to fill up the check.

When he had gone, my friend entered into some explanations.

The first paragraph is a clear example of mimesis, since we are given a detailed narration of what the Prefect actions were at the moment. However, in the second paragraph, which constitutes diegesis, we have a quick, general piece of information of what happened afterwards.

The second area that Genette mentioned constitutes the focalization of the narrative. In the case of “The Purloined Letter,” we can conclude that it was written with an "external" focalization, due to the fact that we are only told about actions that can be seen by anybody, therefore not including internal thoughts and feelings that we could not have knowledge of unless we were told. In this story, the narrator tells us only what happened between himself, Dupin and the Prefect, without mentioning anything beyond what he could see. This way, we reach Genette's third area: the narrator of the story. In this case, it is "overt", that is to say that he has witnessed and/or participated in the events he relates, which is exactly the case of our narrator. Moreover, he is a "homodiegetic" narrator, since he takes part in the story he tells us.

The fourth area refers to time, and in Poe's story he deals with an "analeptic" narration. We can reach this conclusion because when the narrator is telling Dupin how he had decided to go and try to obtain the letter by himself, he also reminds him of certain things that the Prefect had said that led the narrator to be more certain of the whereabouts of the letter. This way, he was mentioning references back in time, which is precisely the essence of analepsis.

“The Purloined Letter” is not a frame narrative, which would have constituted Genette's fifth area. Instead, this is a straight story, which means that we are not dealing with a story within a story. That would be the characteristic of frame narrations, which include embedded narrations or "meta-narratives" (the stories within the "frame" story, the former usually being the main ones).

Finally, the sixth area is about speech and thought. In the story we are analyzing, we can find direct and selectively tagged speech, such as:

“D--,” replied Dupin, “is a desperate man, and a man of nerve [...].”

“How? Did you put anything particular in it?”

Both sentences are written in direct speech, but the first one is tagged ('replied Dupin'), whereas the second one is not. That is why we talk about "selectively tagged", sometimes it is tagged, sometimes it is not. However, if we follow strictly Genette's terms for representation of speech, then “The Purloined Letter” has been written under mimetic speech, which is the same as saying "direct and tagged", even if it is sometimes untagged as well.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was Poe's only finished novel and was actually published in 1838. His story laid the basis for much of the ensuing frenzy with whalers and living on the ocean for years at a time. The story is fabulous and the most imaginative ever conceived by Poe. Some of his religion or imposed beliefs included a since dismissed theory probably taken from Greek mythology of the hollow earth.

Theories of the Hollow Earth are that the Earth has a hollow interior and an inhabited one. We have all seen and read stories about journeys to the center of the earth. The theory postulates that since man has never drilled deeper than fiften miles, his knowledge of the Earth extend's only that deep. The theory has now been relagated to that science fiction pulp known as pseudoscience or fraudulent science.

The story and storyline of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is from scholarly accounts Poe's fantasy of adventures he himself would have liked to have undertaken much like Jules Verne's identifying with his most beloved character Captain Nemo.

The name Arthur Gordon Pym is stylistically similar to the sounds of Edgar Allan Poe.

We begin to learn of Gordon Pym as he leaves Edgartown, Massachusetts on Martha's Vineyard. How terribly Poe! The psychological mindset of the novel begins at once, Gordon Pym is escaping himself or his ego. The actual story reads like a travel book of where we went and on what ship. The adventures on board ship may have been censored since they include much of that period's fascination with primitivism or the concept of the Noble Savage unsullied with civilization.

Poe was at his diabolical best in this novel in my opinion. The publishing of the book itself was to be a hoax. All I have to say is this: Was there really an Arthur Gordon Pym? Or was he only Edgar Allan Poe's alter ego? The cataloguing of dates and ships and places becomes almost to impossible to believe that they came out of Poe's frenzied though it was, imagination. And, although the book was the only novel Poe actually finished was claimed by the envious British publishers to have ended unfinished due to the death of Arthur Gordon Pym.

I am thinking that perhaps a resurgence or a group of fanatic Poe's could center on this novel as an escape into the mind of a master.

Poe's characters appear to be summarising the overall scheme of the detective fiction genre: Dupin characterises the problem the Prefect is faced with as being "Simple and odd". The basic situations of a detective tale are often of a criminal and very striking nature, be it murder, theft or things alike. Surrounding these events is an aura of the absurd or puzzling, something that makes the case at hand unusual and worth examining.

For the reader who is interested in digging into the fundamentals of the plot, discovering who committed the crime or what may be the hidden clue to solve the mystery is an essential and entertaining part of detective fiction. Dupin, again, gives a hint on how to untangle the woven net of clues. Like the Prefect, a lot of readers tend to think way off the track. While the Prefect has his men practically dismantle complete houses including their surroundings instead of looking in the closest and most obvious spots, the audience seems to be misguiding themselves through increased expectations. The riddles will not always be solved by looking for cavities carved into wooden bedposts, likewise, the riddles will sometimes be solved by focusing the attention to the most apparent solutions.

Like the boy at a game of "even and odd" or like Dupin with his adversary Minister D, the reader should be aware of the "opponent's" (the story in question) quality. Different qualities of writing demand for different strategies of reading: a plain and simple story demands very little of the reader, the solutions may, therefore, be close at hand. More complex stories can contain foreboded twists and truly tense forms of detective writing can afford leaving the most obvious solution to a riddle undiscovered by the reader due to doing what all good magicians do: lure the audience's attention away from the point of action.

Poe manages to completely summarize the methods of detective fiction wrapped up in a detective tale of his own. He even includes some advice for his readers and readers in general on how to deal with this literary genre and makes reading even more enjoyable and less frustrating for those who wish to occasionally play detective for themselves while reading.