Comparing two poems

Comparison and Contrast

The two poems to be compared and contrasted are Edgar Alan Poe 's Annabel Lee ' and Robert Browning 's My Last Duchess

Annabel Lee ' is a poem that tells the story of a young man 's loss of his lover . The speaker can be determined to be male not only by the fact that he claims Annabel Lee as a focus of romantic interest but because he also refers to her as his bride ' However , it seems unlikely that the speaker was ever actually married to Annabel Lee because he

seems to have little influence over her treatment once she falls ill

Aside from the theme of loss , there are also themes of obsession (on the part of the speaker , defiance of social norms , illicit love innocence , idealism and possibly insanity

The case of loss is obvious . The entire focus of the poem is the speaker 's record of attempting to deal with the death of his bride In some ways , the poem is more of a monument to this sensation of loss than it is a fitting epitaph for some departed loved one

The theme of obsession is captured by the repetition within the poem The singsong refrain of Annabel Lee 's name creates an impression that the speaker will be unable to ever overcome his impossible love for her It implies that everything in his life is inescapably cyclical and that any efforts to divorce himself from Annabel 's power will lead him inevitably back to the sea

Innocence is encapsulated by the line , I was a child and she was a child (7 . This is not meant to be taken literally . Although probably very young lovers , they were probably not actually children . Instead the speaker is claiming that they were children to bring across the idea that the speaker and Annabel Lee were so innocently in love that they viewed the world around them naively , with wonder , in such a way that they might have been perceived as child-like

The defiance of social norms , or rebellion , is conveyed through the lines of But our love it was stronger by far than the love /Of those who were older than we (27 . Despite the speaker 's inability to have any control over Annabel Lee 's placement after she becomes sick , he is able to have power of how often he visits her grave . This defies social norms because it is apparent that a great deal of time has passed since her death and that the appropriate time for mourning has passed . The speaker , however , is unable or unwilling to allow his memory of her to pass

That leads us to the theme of insanity . Because of his insistence of visiting Annabel Lee 's grave with predictable regularity , the speaker is never going to be able to move on with his life . He has invested so much in his worship of his idea of who Annabel Lee was that he will fail to ever remember her...