Although Edgar Allan Poe's memorable poem "Annabel Lee" does not immediately come to mind in a gothic sense, it does contain virtually all of the elements expected of that style. In literature, the term "gothic" usually includes some specific ingredients: a mansion or castle, a women in need, a man with a love interest, a shroud of gloom or mystery, and a barbarous or terrible act. It is often related to something very old (since Gothic also refers to 17th century architecture) and often with supernatural references. "Annabel Lee" certainly contains all of these traits.
The age is evident--"It was many and many a year ago..." Since Annabel lived in a "kingdom," a castle is inferred, though never specifically mentioned. The love interest between Annabel and the narrator is most obvious, and Annabel becomes a woman in need when
A wind blew out of a cloud by night
Chilling my Annabel Lee;
So that her high-born kinsmen came
And bore her away from me.
Sick from the night chill, Annabel needed someone to take care of her--rescue her from the grip of Death. When she dies, she is shut up "in a sepulchre," another gothic reference to an old fashioned tomb.
The barbarous act is, of course, the sudden death of one so young and beautiful. The poem consistently exudes a terribly gloomy aura throughout, heightened by Poe's references to the supernatural--"demons," "angels," and "winged seraphs"--and words such as "dissever." The narrator's obsessive desire to stay with her "all the night-tide" further adds to the extreme melancholia of the poem. So, like many of Poe's other works, "Annabel Lee," too, has a distinct gothic feel.
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