Comment on how the writer's use of structure, form and language shape meaning (in Edgar Allan Poe's 'Annabel Lee')

In ‘Annabel Lee’ by Edgar Allan Poe, structure is played off against language. A morbid narrative – the death of a young girl, with whom the poet is clearly infatuated – is penned in lines of verse that bear structural similarities to a nursery rhyme. The start of the poem evinces this, ‘It was many and many a year ago’. The poet begins with this stereotypical, story-like first line to prepare the reader for a jaunty poetic narrative (which, as we shall discover, is only to be frustrated). Similarly, we may note the poet’s occasional recourse to an archaic word order, ‘a maiden there lived’, and the persistent use of the ‘-ee/-ea’ rhyme, particularly with the rhyming pair ‘Lee/ Sea’. These three features that I have pointed out lend Poe’s verses the jolly, upbeat sound and poetic texture of a stereotypical fairy-tale yarn. And yet, the semantic content of the poem contradicts the structural jollity imparted by the fairy-tale features. We hear of the death of the eponymous Annabel Lee. The final lines most explicitly reveal the poem’s inner morbid content, ‘In her sepulchre there by the sea-/ In her tomb by the sounding sea.’ This rhyming couplet is one of the relatively few instances of grammatical apposition in the poem, and thus it receives emphasis. The poet thus leaves the reader in no doubt as to the sinister core of this dark elegy, whose fairy-tale structure is merely a masquerade.